perfidy

The Carnival of the Recipes, cocktail party edition, is now up!

I wish I’d’a remembered to submit something. I have some good cocktail recipes.

Just reading the quotes for “Red Dawn” on the IMDB makes me want to punch a commie in the face. I don’t think I could be trusted to keep things playful at the event in question.

I can’t make it, but I hope anyone who is dresses appopriately.

Flyer below the fold:

Ok, sorry- the image was too big to re-size nicely here. Here’s the link instead to the kickass flyer.

What the crying hell is wrong with England?

A pregnant woman has been told that her baby will be taken from her at birth because she is deemed capable of “emotional abuse”, even though psychiatrists treating her say there is no evidence to suggest that she will harm her child in any way.

Social services’ recommendation that the baby should be taken from Fran Lyon, a 22-year-old charity worker who has five A-levels and a degree in neuroscience, was based in part on a letter from a paediatrician she has never met.

Hexham children’s services, part of Northumberland County Council, said the decision had been made because Miss Lyon was likely to suffer from Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy, a condition unproven by science in which a mother will make up an illness in her child, or harm it, to draw attention to herself.

Under the plan, a doctor will hand the newborn to a social worker, provided there are no medical complications. Social services’ request for an emergency protection order - these are usually granted - will be heard in secret in the family court at Hexham magistrates on the same day.

From then on, anyone discussing the case, including Miss Lyon, will be deemed to be in contempt of the court.

And we’re all worried about al Qaeda. How droll.

So, humanity has been working on making things fly like insects and birds for - what? - millennia? And working toward that endeavor seriously since Galileo.

It’s a crazy dream of humanity for thousands and thousands of years, and now I see the damn solution to the problem - a toy that mimics the flight of a dragonfly - on a commercial on a basic cable station during, appropriately enough, an airing of the new series of Doctor Who.

Ladies and gentlemen, the future is here.

The New York Times has a remarkable story this week about a photo album that came out of Auschwitz, with an accompanying slideshow that's incredibly arresting. You see, rather than the usual deeply upsetting images of skeletonesque inmates suffering untold miseries, they're pictures of their captors and executioners at rest and play, frolicking, hanging out, mugging for the camera, generally behaving like any people taking a break from the rigors of a job well done would. Except that the same day the pictures were taken, these well-rested and attractive people committed incredibly depraved acts against other humans. In these images, even Dr. Joseph Mengele seems like a shrimpy nebbish, with barely a hint of the maggots roiling behind his smiling eyes.

There's one woman in the pictures, who appears a few times. She's clearly a camp administrator of some kind, and she's young, fresh, and pretty. She's clearly vivacious and strong-willed; it's easy to be attracted to this face from more than sixty years ago and imagine a friendship or a friendly beer. And then I realize that behind that smile and those pretty eyes is a mind completely and totally at ease with sorting families into keepers and corpses every single day, and I want to puke myself dry.

Thank the deity of your choice that such an artifact exists, and is in the hands of the National Holocaust Museum. For the danger, as we all know intellectually but tend to forget in our guts, is not from overt acts of monstrousness, but in the workaday -- yes -- banality of evil.

Johnny Rotten is not impressed with the Police reunion. Plus drug advice!

While looking for the answer to a completely different question, I ran across this nugget at Yahoo Answers:

Should politicians who fillibuster be tazed?
And put on Americas funniest?

This from a person named “Dr. Spanky”. Oddly, the site doesn’t appear to list where s/he went to med school or garnered a PhD, but since it appeared, ignoring the inherent irony of the site’s name, on Yahoo Answers, you know it’s a credible and important question, needing an answer.

Or not, as it turns out. Most of the several answers were provided in what I think was the spirit of the question. One, however, I think his name was “Buzzkill”, responded:

No, because the rules specifically allow for that activity.

You cannot (reasonably) punish someone for following the rules. All you can do is change the rules.

And since he’s flagged as a “Top Contributor”, whatever that implies, I guess there’s supposed to be some authority behind his revelation, for which we’re all better off. I’m sure that his next act, after posting that clarification, was to go out and yell at the neighbor kids to get off his god damned lawn.

[Wik] Apparently, I ran across that question while it was still fresh, and Buzzkill’s comment was less than a minute old. Serendipity, I guess. Anyway, the discussion’s already degenerated to whinging about brown shirts with Tasers, how they should actually taser the guy who started a war based on lies, and the usual bullshit claptrap. It was fun for the couple minutes it lasted, though.

[alsø wik] But wait - the fun’s not quite over yet! This, from the (appropriately) self-monikered “Deep Thought”:

Why stop at tazering for filibusters? I’m sure there is good money to be made if you just let people tazer Robert Byrd for fun. Think of the potential. 535 members of Congress. Millions of upset voters. We could pay off the deficit.

But it doesn’t. From a WSJ email, dispatched this evening to my inbox, this story:

NEWS ALERT
from The Wall Street Journal

Sept. 17, 2007

William Lerach is set to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy in the criminal case involving the noted securities lawyer’s former firm, now called Milberg Weiss LLP. The plea agreement, which calls for a one to two year prison term, could be announced as soon as Tuesday.

I’m all for protecting the common man, the common investor, and I’m nothing if not both of those things. However, while Milberg Weiss (...Bershad Hynes & Lerach) LLP has always claimed that their seldom-seemly, and often seedy, pursuit of class action lawsuits, against any company whose stock price took a noteworthy downturn, was for the public good, I’ve never been able to agree.

Not in my stance as a champion of the unfettered right of public companies to run roughshod over their investors, either. Because I have no such stance. Instead, my dim view of him and all who practice his kind of law is justified by standard tactics he and his partners (current and former) have used in pursuit of specious claims. Think “greenmail”, ala Carl Icahn and Boone Pickens in the 1980s - make life tough enough for someone, even someone who’s got no basis for having to defend their actions, and they’ll pay you to go away.

As referred to in an Los Angeles Business Journal article of Sep 3, 2007, Lerach is an “economic terrorist”, and I don’t think that’s too tough a characterization of him. As the article says:

Lerach, of course, did not invent but did perfect the securities class action lawsuit. In that scheme, most any company that sustained a stock drop, even if it had nothing to do with anything of consequence, often found itself the recipient of allegations of fraud in a Lerach-engineered lawsuit. Likewise, companies that announced most anything negative could get the same kind of lawsuit – often within hours of the announcement.

Lerach then pounded the company, using the discovery process to find some little scrap somewhere in some underling’s file drawer that “proved” the company knew that bad news could develop.

In other words, this guy, and all lawyers like him, specialized in swooping in any time there was even a flimsy pretext for doing so. I mean, there’s no way a stock could drop without malfeasance and lying on the part of management, right?

Well, no - that’s wrong. But Lerach, et al, after having put their lawsuit’s stake in the ground, would then embark on forced discovery at their target companies, essentially fishing around for a reason to justify their lawsuit.

And one doesn’t have to be a big-business apologist to find that sort of thing to be outside the bounds of fair and reasonable play.

Over the years, I’ve been the recipient of at least 50 securities class action solicitations. I received one just the other day, ”In re CARDINAL HEALTH, INC. SECURITIES LITIGATION“. And while I almost never take the time to participate in these paper chases, I’ve always paid particular attention to any such action which has either “Lerach Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP” or any of the many versions of “Milberg Weiss +/-Bershad +/-Hynes +/-Lerach LLP” listed as the attorneys looking out for my “best interests”.

Because they don’t, they haven’t, and investors are simply a raw material for them and their business process. And I throw their solicitations away as soon as possible, to avoid stinking the house up.

His former partner Bershad has already pled, and if the news report is correct, Lerach’s getting ready to do the same. It’s not the Christian thing to say, but I’m not much of a Christian anyway, so I’ll hope that Milberg, Weiss, and all the rest be following them to the pokey soon after.

So, now that I have the flamejob for this:

I did this:

From right to left that's two pain levain batards, two sourdough boules, and a part-rye part whole-wheat sourdough miche of my own design - about eleven pounds of lovely bread I turned out of my oven today. This was probably the best day of baking I've ever had.

In the background, you can see Herman, my stout and doughty sourdough culture, his billions of yeasts and bacteria toiling away happily on a fresh feeding.

I have a nice little life going here. Better not blink.

Anadama bread is a traditional coastal New England bread with molasses and cornmeal that makes excellent toast and incredible peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The original recipe, so the legend goes, comes from a Rockport, Massachusetts man (up the coast on Cape Ann, next to Gloucester where they're all gruff fisherman) whose wife ran off and left him with nothing in the house but cornmeal, molasses, and flour. He baked all these into a loaf and named it "Anna, damn 'er." History is silent on whether Anna deserved this infamy.

I have been making Anadama bread for years, from recipes by James Beard and Peter Reinhardt, but since I have had some time off recently caring for an infant, I've gone back to the drawing board, refined the basic formula into by far the best version I have ever tasted, and am now ready to pass it along to you, you lucky dog.

My basic innovations are to use a somewhat higher proportion of cornmeal and molasses than I've seen elsewhere, to add a little (optional) whole wheat flour for nutrition and complexity, and to use a two-starter method to build the dough rather than the traditional straight method.

The extra molasses and cornmeal (which is really pushing the limit for what this formula can take and still rise well) give the bread a distinctively "Anadama" character which I like a lot. For the same reason, I also prefer to use blackstrap molasses, the darkest, most intensely flavored molasses out there. It just tastes better in this bread, though you may certainly use dark or golden molasses if that's what you have around.

The two starters, a soaker and a sponge, are here for several reasons. The cornmeal soaker softens up the grain, which means: more sugar is available for the yeast to feed on; the particles of meal are softer and less prone to cut into the bread's gluten structure, giving a lighter loaf; and the cornmeal cooks more completely in the oven. A sponge of some of the flour gives great depth of flavor, promotes the activity of enzymes that make the dough more elastic, and also lowers the pH of the dough slightly, which (probably, so the theory goes) helps to soften the bran in the whole wheat and therefore keeps the loaf lighter. Putting all this together may seem like a pain in the keister, but it really amounts to five minutes of work done over two days.

Soaker:

10 oz cornmeal
10 oz water, room temperature

Sponge:

8 oz (1 3/4 cups) all-purpose or bread flour (11% protein content minimum)
7 oz water, room temperature
1/2 tsp yeast

Main Dough:

8 oz (1 3/4 cups) all-purpose or bread flour (11% protein content minimum), plus more in reserve
6 oz (1 1/2 cups) whole wheat flour (or, 6 more ounces AP or bread flour)
1 1/2 tsp instant yeast
.4 oz (1 1/2 tsp) salt
4.5 oz (1/3 cup) molasses, preferably blackstrap
1 oz (2 tbsp) unsalted butter, at room temperature

(For the hardcore here's the baker's percentages):
Flour................. 100%
Water................ 77%
Yeast................. about 1.1%
Salt................... 1.8%
Cornmeal........... 45%
Molasses............ 20%
Unsalted Butter... 4.5%

1) The night before you bake, make your soaker: combine the cornmeal and water in a small bowl, mix well, and cover with plastic wrap. Alternatively, you can make a hot soaker on baking day: heat the water to about 130-140 degrees, combine cornmeal and water, mix well, cover, and let stand for 4 hours. The higher temperature seems to help the cornmeal take up the water more quickly, and may contribute to a softer dough.

2) The morning of baking day, make your sponge. Combine the flour, water and yeast in a large bowl, whisk or stir together vigorously for at least a minute, and let sit 3-4 hours or until nicely ripe. (Ripe means that the sponge is bubbly and domed, and just beginning to recede. You will know it's ready when it looks like a badlands landscape, with canals just beginning to form on the surface between islands of starter.)

3) Place the flour, yeast and salt for the main dough in a large bowl or the bowl of your stand mixer, and whisk to combine. Add the soaker, the sponge, the molasses, and the butter.

4) Mix in stand mixer on low to medium speed for 6-8 minutes (using the paddle until things come together, and then switching to the dough hook), or, if kneading by hand, mix just until the ingredients are combined and then turn out onto a lightly floured surface and knead for 10-12 minutes. Add flour as necessary to make a smooth but somewhat tacky dough - it should clear the bowl but cling a little to a dry finger applied to the surface for a few seconds.

(This is a good opportunity to hone your skills working with a wonky dough - it tends to start off looking drier than it should, and then because of all the cornmeal cutting into the newly formed gluten, becomes rather unruly before turning into a smooth dough. You may need to add flour while you knead, but give it at least two minutes by machine or four by hand before adding flour a tablespoon at a time, to ensure you don't overdo it. )

5) Place kneaded dough in a lightly oiled large bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise in a warm place (80 degrees) for 90 minutes. Halfway through, give the dough a business-letter fold*.

6) Remove dough from bowl, divide into two equal pieces, and gently preshape**. Let rest covered for 15 minutes.

7) Preheat oven to 350.

8) Shape each piece into a freeform round or batard loaf, or shape and place in lightly oiled loaf pans. Proof 60-90 minutes or until nearly doubled.

9) Bake in oven for 40-50 minutes, turning halfway through. If you wish, you may steam the oven*** when you place the loaves to promote a better oven spring.

10) When the internal temperature is above 190 degrees, and the loaf is a nice dark golden brown on all sides, remove from oven. (Or, just give 'em the full 50 minutes if there's doubt.) Remove from pans, if used, and place on a rack to cool. Wait at least 1 hour before slicing!****

* A business-letter fold is a fancy way of punching down partially risen dough. The intended effects are two: to gently expel some of the gas that has begun to accumulate, and to line up the gluten structure of the dough to promote a good rise, a good shape, and an attractive loaf.

Here's how:

1) Using a bowl scraper, remove the dough from the rising bowl onto a lightly floured surface. Using the flats of your fingers, gently press down all over the dough to let some air out. Do not mash the edges, do not try to pop visible bubbles, and do not be forceful.

2) Gently pull the sides of the dough outward just a little so that the entire mass is an ovalish-rectanglish shape with the long sides going left to right.

3) With your hands, take the left side of the dough up and fold it about two-thirds of the way over the rest of the mass, as if you were folding a letter into thirds. Repeat with the right side, folding it all the way to the opposite edge. Do not press down to seal.

3a) In some very slack doughs - not this one - you may turn the dough 90 degrees and repeat this process before returning the dough to its bowl, to build additional strength.

4) Replace dough in bowl, folded side down, and cover once again with plastic wrap.

** To preshape a loaf is to take the ugly cut piece you have, and turn it into something orderly so that it will form a neater loaf that will rise and eat better.

1) Place the dough piece cut side up on a very lightly floured surface. Take the top edge and fold it toward the middle of the mass. With the heel of your hand, gently but firmly press it into place. Take the piece of edge that's at about 2:00 and repeat. Continue clockwise like this all the way around. When you are finished, the dough should be closer to round, and elastic enough to spring back just a little when you take your hand away.

2) Then, take the 12:00 and 6:00 edges and bring them toward each other. Press them together to gently seal. Repeat with the 3:00 and 6:00 edges. Repeat again in each direction. Alternatively, if you are expert at shaping round loaves, you can tighten the gluten on the "good" surface a bit using whatever method you prefer.

4) Finally, turn the preshaped piece of dough seam side down onto a lightly floured surface, cover with a bowl or plastic wrap and let rest for 15-20 minutes.

*** To steam an oven:

1) Place an old cast iron skillet or cake pan you never plan to use again on the floor of the oven, or on the lowest rack if using an electric oven. Preheat the oven with the pan inside.

2) When you place your loaves in the oven, carefully pour 1 cup of very hot or boiling water into the pan before you shut the oven door. Be careful! - steam burns are bad news.

If you are afraid of pouring water into your oven, you can use a few ice cubes instead, placing them in the pan when the loaf goes in, though this does rob the oven of a little heat. You can also use a spray bottle to mist the dough with water prior to going in the oven, and then spray the oven walls quickly with water at two-minute intervals for the first eight minutes or so of baking. This method also leads to great heat loss, so tack a few more minutes of baking time on the end.

Now... why steam your oven at all? Well, steam will keep the starches in the crust from gelatinizing (hardening) as quickly while the loaf undergoes its last speedy rise in the intense heat of the oven. For this recipe this is optional, but you will probably find you get a slightly better oven spring from steam.

**** Why wait until the bread is cool before slicing? Because bread isn't done baking until the loaf has come back down to almost room temperature. As the loaf cools, the internal structure is continuing to gelatinize (set and become edible) and flavor compounds are continuing to develop. This process doesn't fully run its course until the bread is nearly cool. The only bread you should eat hot is bad bread; good bread deserves good treatment and a full cooling before cutting.

The Carnival of the Recipes #159, with a Proustian In Search of Lost Time theme, is now up. Visit! Cook! Eat!

There's two things that I am for sure: a rabid pro football fan (American style) and a bleeding heart pablum puker.

So, I've been growing increasingly concerned over the last few years as reports have surfaced of the extent and callousness of the NFL's disregard for on-field player injuries and for disabilities suffered by retired players. Now, I'm no idiot. I know coaches regularly put guys in numbed up against cracked ribs or a broken finger to finish a series or a game. It's football! But when you get beyond that, into the realm of doping up a lineman with a broken spine and sending him into the game, or letting your QB or running back play when he's been hit on the head so hard he's not sure of his name, the date, or which way is up, that's a different story. Then pro football with its pads and lucrative ad deals, devolves into mere crude bloodsport (rather than a bloodsport at a remove, which is so much more civilized and refined). My own New England Patriots and their coach Bill Belichick are reportedly among the worst offenders here, taking horrible and stupid risks with players' health that has cut many careers, and doubtless many lives, short.

Now, again, that's theoretically an uncomplicated matter of well-informed people making choices as adults to put themselves in harm's way. But the truth, naturally is not so neat. Via unfogged I have found a fascinating and dismaying article in Men's Journal about the shameful and shabby treatment of retired injured players at the hands of the NFLPA (the players' union), the league itself, and the various bodies set up to take care of retired players.

[wik] A final question: What sense could it possibly make to put a player who makes $6M a year, by contract, for multiple years, in harm's way unnecessarily? How is that good business? Your journeyman halfback plays on an injured knee, blows out his meniscus and his ACL or fractures his spine, and then collects the rest of his four-year contract from the sidelines, unable to do what he was hired to do but owed every penny of his salary. Wouldn't it make more rational sense to take better care of your players and try not to play them when injured, in an effort to preserve your investment in him? Hell, leaving aside the fact that this would be the decent thing to do, it's economically sensible!

Am I right? Am I right?

It's been a long standing point of minor contention between myself and Goodwyfe Johno that for some reason she won't let me have a flamejob put on our Oldsmobile sedan. Says it's a frivolous waste of money... I guess I can see her point, but I have a hard time liking it.

But let nobody say she's not a good person: yesterday she found for me a guy who makes flamejob decals... for home stand mixers like my Kitchenaid Artisan 600! A silver-and-black flamejob diamond-plate pattern flamejob decal is on its way to my home as we speak, to give my Kitchenaid mixer at least 100 more horsepower of pure high-grade awesome. My mixer, when done, will look very much like this (except awesome silver on awesome red):

I love the internets.

Well... we did.

Linus John:

... and with a very sleep-deprived papa, enjoying the soothing tones of Cuban dance music played at deafening volume. Good kid. (Nota bene: even on no sleep with a new infant in the house, I still look at least 5-8 years younger than my actual age. Good genes, evidently!)

And, yes, I'm posting a mildly topical fake-blog item, just to nudge Sparky's junk (below) off the top half of the page. For the children.

There's a little lot near where I live now that usually has some sort of stand set up on it. In June it's fireworks. I've also seen sunglasses, cellular phone accessories, peaches, onions, and other things for sale there as well.

Over the weekend this stand caught my eye though. Hatch green chiles are common this time of year. But then I saw the adjacent tent and I just had to wonder...

Thank Goodness that Patton put up that li'l thing about Romanian IRS scammers, because I was about to go nucular in an attempt to spark some posting around here.
Namely, I was going to challenge my fellow ministers to kick this off the front page as quickly as humanly possible:

Comments are a service provided by the Ministry of Minor Perfidy to you, the gentle reader. This service is subject to revocation on a retail or wholesale basis at the whim of the Ministry. Only one individual has thus far incurred our wrath sufficiently to be permanently banned. Don’t be that guy.

Swear, curse and spit if it makes you feel better. Generally speaking, saying “fuck” a lot doesn’t improve the quality of your writing, unless you’re Charles Bukowski. I don’t think you’re Chuck, though. In any event, we won’t delete your post for foul language. As to general purpose offensiveness, we all have pretty thick skins and you’d have to be a real jackass to get a post deleted for that reason. So don’t be that guy.

Please note that any advertisement made in this space is subject to a fee of $500 per ad, per page view. Posting an ad indicates your agreement with this fee schedule. If you are a comment spammer, please immediately die a prolonged, agonizing and messy death. After you pay the fee.

To sum up: play nice, share your toys with the other kids, and pretend you’re having a nice conversation with friends at your favorite restaurant. Remember, we’re watching you. And don't forget that by submitting a comment you grant the Ministry a license to reproduce your words, name, likeness, address, phone number and sexual history in perpetuity.

In my time, I've seen examples of just about every scam possible via the Internet. It takes a lot any more to even get my attention as I'm one-button flushing my spam folders.

However, when someone goes above and beyond the call of scum-baggish presumption in reader/recipient stupidity, I think it deserves to be highlighted. I'm a "giver" that way.

Below, in its exact form, including the badly mangled HTML formatting, but minus the actual link to the scamster's site, the silliest and least plausible piece of spam I think I've received in at least a couple days:

Of course, I almost fell for it, because:

• The IRS always communicates with me by sending me email at my blogging email address, natch
• The IRS always speaks to tax payers that way, all courtly-like, and offers its "Regards"
• The IRS always gets things done in 6-9 days
• The IRS claims copyright on all of its email messages, just like normal citizens do
• While claiming said copyright, the IRS always makes sure the recipient knows that it's the "Internal Revenue Service U.S.A.", to avoid confusion with all the other Internal Revenue Services around the world.

It occurs to me that if we didn't have Russian, Romanian, and Slobovian hackers, we'd have to invent them, for our own amusement.

[wik] It further occurs to me that, in order to avoid appearing churlish, I should point out that if someone wants my $93.60 refund, let me know, and I'll pass along the link.

Heya kiddies, it's time for yet another installment of Johno's Hangover Food for Ambitious Drunkards! (I realize that this is the first time I've actually ever used that particular phrase, but look back through the extensive catalog of recipes I have posted to this site and you'll see that pretty much that's all I do.)

Check out these banana pancakes - I invented these this morning because I need potassium. And sleep. I need sleep. Y'see, I have a one week old infant in the house who's doing the usual sleep and eat and eliminate in no pattern around the clock whatsoever thing, and I've developed this persistent twitch in my left eyelid. Clearly a potassium deficiency, right? Right?

Anyway, these are incredibly delicious, like almost ridiculously good, and ridiculously easy to whip up on no notice.

Banana Pancakes
makes 4 big and thick pancakes, serving two. Doubles (or more) well.

1 cup (4.5 oz) white whole wheat* flour, or 1/2 cup all-purpose flour and 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 tbsp sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup milk
1 large egg, beaten
2 tbsp melted butter
2 small or 1 large banana, mashed

Combine all dry ingredients and whisk together. Combine all liquid ingredients except banana and whisk together well. Add banana to liquid and whisk thoroughly again.

Pour liquid ingredients into dry and stir with a whisk ten times only - ten! only! to combine. Lumps are OK.

Cook in half-cup amounts on greased pan or griddle with surface temperature 350 degrees.

I repeat: these are CRAZY GOOD.

*King Arthur offers flour milled from white winter wheat, which lacks some of the bitterness and whole-wheat character of regular red whole wheat. This makes it much better for pastry applications where the nutrition and added flavor complexity of whole wheat flour is desired - cookies, pancakes, biscuits, waffles, and if you use some trickery, even pie crust.

American Wheat Ale

5 lbs wheat dry malt extract (50% wheat, 50% barley)
2 oz Hallertau Mittelfreuh hops, in 1/2 oz plugs
White Labs WLP 001, California Ale Yeast

Brought 3/5 gallons of spring water to boil in kettle. Added extract and 1 oz hops at boil.
Added 1/2 oz flavor hops at 30 minutes
Added another 1/2 oz hops at 15 minutes

Pitched yeast at 68 degrees - fermented itself up to 72 and was done in about 3 days. Racked to secondary and let settle for 3 weeks before kegging.

This beer is fantastic. Smooth, creamy, with that clear hop flavor and faint tartness that California yeast brings. Oddly for a wheat, it's crystal clear and golden, not as pale or hazy as I might have expected. Well, I might have added some Irish moss to clarify; I just don't damn well remember. Nice sweetness, beautifully balanced bitterness with a great touch of noble hop flavor and a little aroma. I swear I'm getting some creamsicle notes off this, and it's really wonderful. I'll be making this one again, no doubt.

I don't know who the hell Ronald Jenkees is, or where he came from, but this freaky mothereffer has his shit together. Such a geek! Such incredible beats!!! How soon till H.O.V.A. calls Ronald up for his next inevitable comeback? How many of our readers thought that last sentence was total gibberish?

Support your local independent musicians, y'all!

(found via boingboing)

Too Bitter Porter

So, what I was after, was a nice dry porter with a good dose of spicy herbal hops in the flavor and nose. What I got was horribly overbittered and a good beer ruined. I ended up tossing the last half of this batch from the keg to make room for the next brew I did. So, that's pretty much a disaster.

5 lbs light dry malt extract
3/4 lbs crystal malt, 60L
1/4 lb chocolate malt
1/4 lb black patent malt
.8 oz Galena hop pellets, bittering (12% AAU)
1 oz UK Fuggles hop pellets, aroma and flavor
1 oz Tettnanger Tettnang hop pellets, aroma and flavor
2 packages SAFale 33 dry ale yeast

Steeped grains in 1 gallon of spring water and brought 3 to boil. Sparged grains in hot kettle water and added steeping water. Galena and DME added at boil
Hop addition:
Galena 60 min
1/2 oz each Tett and Fuggles 20 min
1/2 oz each Tett and Fuggles, 5 min

Pitched yeast at 72 degrees. Fermentation began slowly but wrapped up in three days. Racked to secondary and let rest for three weeks before kegging. Force-carbonated with CO2.

Almost, but not quite, a good beer. Actually, quite good with heavy food, but just too much bittering hop. A damn shame.

It's so sad.

The New York Times Magazine has a deeply depressing ten-page spread this week about the New Savior of the Music Bidness, the One Hero Who Can Save Us All From Certain Penury and Unemployment From Our Phoney Baloney Jobs... Mister Rick Rubin!!

Yep, Rick Rubin. Helluva record producer. Helluvan ear on that guy. LL, Run DMC, Slayer, Anthrax, the Chili Peppers, Johnny Cash's comeback, Neil Friggin' Diamond's very good comeback... that guy knows music for sure. But to save the music industry? Rick Rubin?

Please.

The thrust of the article is that Sony has made Rick Rubin the co-Head of Columbia Records, in the hopes of injecting a little of that wyld-ass energy he's got into the proceedings, and in the process transmogrifying the ailing Industry into something leaner, meaner, and more efficent at siphoning money into the pockets of shareholders.

Now, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with that, really. The job of a corporation is, indeed, to "maximize shareholder value." So good luck with that. But check out some of the "hot" "new" "ideas" that Rubin and his co-Head, a middle-aged run of the mill British record exec named Steve Barnett

(I once worked for a sharp and dapper gentleman, a young pretty thing and a rising force in the Industry, who had a taste for shiny suits, expensive haircuts, and the saddest upscale parties I've ever been near, lame affairs where the lower echelons sucked down furious premium cocktails on the company dime while a D-list hipster celebrity like Tricky or the guy who played drums on that Bjork record lurked sulkily in a padded banquette until enough minutes had crawled past that he could reasonably said to have performed the favor of appearing. This particular person had a penchant for arranging the firings of underlings who, in his estimation, were not partying hard enough at company outings. This man had executive power and the trust of a wealthy aging blowhard who once was a person of some consequence in music, at least until he was let go.

...but at least let go more gracefully than the one who was sacked after refusing to leave his hot tub to take an urgent call from the CFO, with an unfortunate sequence of words by way of instruction to his minion, such words being unfortunate due to their inference as to the character and moral standing of the CFO, and their audibility in the conference room at the other end of the line, the minion having failed to put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone...

... the wealthy aging blowhard mentioned two paragraphs prior recently being heard to remark an interview, "I love iPod. I think iPod is great...")

...a run of the mill British record executive named Steve Barnett have cooked up to save Columbia, save Sony, and save the World.

This summer, Columbia Records began a program called Big Red. The company invited 20 college students from Harvard, Penn State and the University of Miami to work on various music projects. The interns concentrated mostly on the digital marketing and promotions departments in Columbia's offices in Midtown Manhattan, which are on Madison Avenue in a granite skyscraper designed by Philip Johnson.

At the end of their paid internships, the students took part in focus groups that were closely observed by Steve Barnett, Rubin's co-head at the label, and Mark DiDia, whom Rubin brought in as head of operations, as well as by other Columbia executives. The focus groups may have been the real point of Big Red — Barnett and the New York executives, especially those who had been at Sony for years, wanted to try to take the pulse of the elusive music audience. "The Big Red focus groups were both depressing and informative, and they confirmed what I — and Rick — already knew," DiDia told me afterward. "The kids all said that a) no one listens to the radio anymore, b) they mostly steal music, but they don't consider it stealing, and c) they get most of their music from iTunes on their iPod. They told us that MySpace is over, it's just not cool anymore; Facebook is still cool, but that might not last much longer; and the biggest thing in their life is word of mouth. That's how they hear about music, bands, everything."

Well, duh. But wait! There's an idea here!

At Rubin's suggestion, [Barnett] has also set up a "word of mouth" department, which will probably employ some members of the Big Red focus group along with dozens of other 20-somethings. The "word of mouth" department will function as a publicity-promotional arm of the company, spreading commissioned buzz through chat rooms across the planet and through old-fashioned human interaction. "They tell all their friends about a band," Barnett explained. "Their job is to create interest."

Wow. Damn. The secret to rescuing one of the greatest labels in the history of the world, and the flagship of one the big five... four... three sir! record companies is, pay some teenagers to go on the internet and pretend to give a shit about bands to their friends.

Shit! If only someone'd tried that eight years ago, set up a guy as, I dunno, the "internet marketing manager" and given him money and access to interns eager to tell their buddies all about the next big never-gonna-be, an', an', indie companies that you could pay to get content on dorm-room televisions, an', an' on campuses and into high schools and skate parks! If only every label in the world had tried that exact strategem back at the advent of the decade, the ship mighta been wrenched around by that critical arc minute to swing it juuuuust wide of the iceberg!

Oh, wait. They all screaming goddamn well did.

Brilliant, gentlemen.

But what else have they in mind?

Rubin has a bigger idea [I bet he does (-Johno)]. To combat the devastating impact of file sharing, he, like others in the music business (Doug Morris and Jimmy Iovine at Universal, for instance), says that the future of the industry is a subscription model, much like paid cable on a television set. "You would subscribe to music," Rubin explained, as he settled on the velvet couch in his library. "You'd pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you'd like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television. Anywhere. The iPod will be obsolete, but there would be a Walkman-like device you could plug into speakers at home. You'll say, 'Today I want to listen to ... Simon and Garfunkel,' and there they are. The service can have demos, bootlegs, concerts, whatever context the artist wants to put out. And once that model is put into place, the industry will grow 10 times the size it is now."

So, say I'm somewhere like, I dunno, my buddys fire pit in Northeastern Ohio. We got a bale of primo bud and a cooler full ale. And we wanna rock the fark out to Motorhead. All we gotta do is... wait... dude, do you get broadband out here?

But at least Barnett sees reason here:

Steve Barnett is nervous about the subscription model. "Smart people have told me if the subscription model is not done correctly," he said, "it will be the final nail in our coffin. I've heard both sides of the argument, and I'm not convinced it's the solution to our problems. Rick wants to be a hero immediately. In his mind, you flick a switch and it's done. It doesn't work like that."

So, what you're sayin' is, your highly paid guru who has no office, no shoes, no phone number you can reach him on, and an oracular perspective on the Future of the Industry, is halfway fulla shit. Noted.

But this is where the antics spill over into full-on Larry/Curly/Moe madness. Check this shit out!

Barnett has other ideas, which he is discussing with Rubin. For instance, asking Columbia artists to give the record company up to 50 percent of their touring, merchandising and online revenue. This is unprecedented — even successful artists like the Dixie Chicks make a large percentage of their income from concerts and T-shirts.

So let's break this down good so even the dim kids in the back of the class get it. Artists signed to major labels get this much money from album sales:

• Zero.

If they go reaaaaaaly far, shift a few million units, that number can rocket all the way up to

• A little.

Artists, every artist, from the overly earnest hairy-legged songbird down at your local coffe joint, to Buckethead's wife's excellent band, to Cheap Trick, to the Rolling Stones, Prince, and Barbra herself, make money in these ways:

• Touring and appearances
• Merch (t-shirts, keychains, beer coozies, etc.)
• Whatever b.s. online revenue streams they can dig up.

If the artist also happens to be a songwriter, or to control their own publishing, they may also get decent to spectacular paydays off of that as well, and forego some of the above. (The rap and electronic worlds also have their alternate revenue streams, but at the end of the day they amount to a new flavor of touring, merch, online B.S., publishing, or songwriting.)

So, basically, leaving aside songwriting and publishing which are separate pillars of the business, with their own contracts, deal structures, and support agencies, the magic bullet that's gonna save Sony/Columbia from disappearing up their own anii while simultaneously collapsing in a fiery heap while offstage a muted trumpet plays "waaah-waaah" is, WE'LL FIND OUT WHAT MONEY OUR ARTISTS ARE EARNING, AND MAKE THEM GIVE IT TO US INSTEAD!!!

(While, one presumes, twisting their moustaches in glee and twisting their monocles deeper into their eye sockets, the better to see the young immigrant boys they hired straight off a plane at JFK for a nickel wrestle each other to their deaths. Sweet suffering Jesus; there's villainy, and then there's incompetent cartoon villainy.)

So, while the money man is looking at grade-skool level larceny as a viable corporate survival strategy, what's the GURU up to, Stu?

[Rubin is] always on a quest to find just the right thing, whether it be a book or a building. Recently, he hunted down the brand of water that claims to have the greatest level of purity (Ice Age); he pored over architectural manuals to determine what kind of hinge would have been used in 1923 (for his house); and when Johnny Cash was ailing, Rubin discovered a kinesiologist whom Cash credited with extending his life. And so on. Rubin has always been passionate, even compulsive, about his interests.

Gentlemen, I say with mingled regret and pleasure that you all deserve everything you get.

[wik] Oh, and another thing about that "Big Red" focus group? Isn't it a truism that kids these days (kids these days!!) have finely tuned bullshit detectors that can see right through most forms of marketing known to man and many which haven't even been invented yet? And a bunch of teenagers on the intarnets getting paid in free.... what.... free CDs??? Free "subscriptions" to whatever music download service Sony pukes up?... are going to somehow outwit their peers?

I've seen it a hundred times. Pimping music is wonderful and even fulfilling when you can really believe in the quality of the record you're working. Then it's no so much like whoring, and more like evangelizing. But nine times out of ten, you're actually getting paid to pretend that some giant steaming turd is really a tasty sandwich, when everyone from Prague to Paducah can see the difference. And that not only sucks the soul right out of you, it's how record companies and their hacks become hacks. The stink of hack clings to the hacky hacks like cigar smoke and drug store perfume clings to the upholstery in the $20 lapdance room out at the Moonlight on old Route 11. And you don't really come back from that.