perfidy

Although I'm a couple days late in posting it, just in time for Orthodox Christmas (which happens on the twelfth day of Christmas (this year December 6), which is widely held to be the day that the Three Wise Guys found the manger with the baby Jebus) comes the 73rd Carnival of the Recipes. It's fashioned in an Orthodox Christmas theme, and if you too are a lapsed Methodist with no experience with our Eastern bretheren, the linked carnival will be both appetizing and educational.

Piroshi!

Brew #6

Hey, Porter! Porter

I loved the porter I made the last time, but it could be improved upon. For that one, I used Hallertau Mittelfreuh hops (the same as used in Sam Adams lager) and kept the profile very dry. That was really nice, but the hop nose actually only emerged after three months in the bottle after I had drunk all but two bottles.

So for this one I set out with the intention of making a slightly sweeter porter with a warmer hop profile. Then.

2 cans (6.6 lbs) John Bull pale liquid malt extract
3/4 lb 40L crystal malt
1/4 lb 60L crystal malt
1/4 lb chocolate malt
1/4 lb black patent malt
1 smack pack Wyeast 1028, British Ale yeast
1 oz Perle hops (6.7% AAU), bittering
1 oz Fuggles hops (4.2%), aroma

Made my starter wort for the smack pack on Wednesday, using a small jar of sterilized wort from EasyYeast. It was completely done fermenting and fully settled out in 18 hours flat, which was bad because I wasn't brewing until Saturday. So, we'll see from the start if this works.

Steeped grains for 1 hour at 160 degrees in 3/4 gallons water. Boiled 2.75 gallons water and sparged specialty grain bag in the larger volume of water. Added malt syurp. Added bittering hops.

At 50 minutes, added aroma hops.

Cooled the wort in ice bath plus a frozen soda bottle right in the wort. Took 15 minutes from 212 to 85 degrees. Sweet!

Pitched yeast at 67 degrees. The starter wort was a little warmer than that, since the room was so warm. They say ("they" say) that starter worts can sit for 1 or 2 days after fermentation. I'm pushing it on two fronts. Again, I hope I didn't shock or kill my yeast. If I did, I don't have a backup except for a pack of Windsor, which is really not appropriate for this beer. So, fingers crossed. I hope this will be a little maltier, just a tad heavier, and with the 1028 yeast and Fuggles, a little more warmth in the flavor and aroma. If it works; nummies.

[wik] Hey! It lives! I had to leave my fermenting bucket in the warm apartment overnight, but this afternoon it began bubbling. So that's nice. Looks like I'll be sharing the dining room with five gallons of nascent beer for the next week or so. I'll get the air mattress.

[alsø wik] ....aaand we're delicious! As of March 10, I've got a very nice and complex porter with a faint roasted edge, plenty of body and moderate sweetness, and the complicated spiciness of just enough Fuggles. I really like the Perle hops on the back end, too. They are sort of light and spicy, not at all cloying. Nice! Next time I could probably stand to add even more caramel malt, maybe something in the 90-120L range, and a pound of dry extract in order to make a bigger beer. What would be totally boss would be to use a few ounces of biscuit or Victory malt, if I can get away with steeping them. The bready flavor seems to be in vogue, and I do dig it. I love the London Ale Yeast with this one too. Adding more stuff to this beer will also differentiate this porter from my other one, which is drier, lighter, and uses Hallertau Mittelfreuh for flavor and aroma.

[alsø alsø wik] One thing that has emerged over time (now after about 4 months in the bottle) is a slightly too-strong burned flavor. If I back off next time on the black malt, back to 2 ounces, I think I could keep everything else pretty much the same and hit the mark perfectly. That's the ticket.

One of the awful tragedies of history is that it's always in the past. I'm not being glib. Once it's gone, it's gone.

The Library of Congress has a remarkable exhibition now of color photographs taken in the World War II era of life in the United States. Go look. Here's the main page. It is a time we usually see in black and white, and no matter how good it looks, it is still black and white and therefore just a little too alien for us to perfectly connect with. I guarantee you that at least one of these images will change that.

I fear death and I loathe the perpetual lostness of the past. Sometimes it is a small miracle to through some means - a diary, a photo, a painting - to connect with another person, another time, that is perfectly comprehensible for being human, but enticingly alien as well.

Speaking of hardened little cans of sad, faded powders languishing in the backs of spice cabinets, you know what's fun? I have a little collection of community cookbooks from various places I've lived and where I grew up, and they are a hoot. Entire books have been written about these tomes, charting the rise and fall of rise of canned mushroom soup, Cheez-whiz, Velveeta, pesto, and enough ground beef to kill an army. But what really gets me going is the spices.

Almost all these books contain a recipe much like this:

Chili Con Carne With Hamburger

2 lbs ground beef, browned and drained
1/2 a small onion, diced
1/2 a small bell pepper, diced (optional)
1 can kidney beans
1 can diced stewed tomatoes
1 tsp salt
pinch black pepper
1/4 tsp chili powder

Combine all ingredients in a pot and simmer for one hour. Serves 4-6.

Although I'm paraphrasing from memory, I'm not kidding. 1/4 teaspoon of chili powder - or as much as a whole teaspoon for the incurably bold - in a "chili" meant for six people. Let us take a moment to laugh at the rubeness of our past! Haw! Older cookbooks treat spices as practically nuclear, calling for a "pinch" of cayenne or a 1/2 teaspoon of curry powder in a giant pot of "Curry Surprise," and that never ceases to charm me.

Today, it's fats, with perfectly good recipes practically ruined by replacing fat - any fat! all fat!! - willy nilly with water. Water, not being a fat, is incapable of dissolving fat-soluble flavors, thereby making eating these recipes an exercise in self-abnegation rather than absorption. They may taste perfectly okay, but I guaran-damn-tee you that adding a nice half teaspoon of fat per serving (one half of one teaspoon!) it would taste a damn sight better.

Similarly, sugar is now evil, evil, evil. And while, yes, unrefined sugar in immoderate amounts such as may Americans eat is really very much not good for you, let's be real. Sugar is also food, and it tastes good. And if you're supposed to cut back, cut back! Why go halfway with such disappointing half-measures as those little blue and pink packets of lowered expectations they give you at restaurants? I prefer Diet Coke to the real thing because I don't really care for incredibly sweet things, but I'm not fooling myself into thinking that Diet Coke tastes like anything but a miracle of modern chemistry. On the same note, I recently had the misfortune to try cookies made with Splenda, a noncaloric sugar substitute made by swapping out one hydrocarbon on sucrose for three chlorine atoms, making it undigestible and noncaloric. Splenda behaves like sugar chemically in every way in recipes and on the tongue, except that it is perfectly indigestible. At least that's the claim. Well, let me tell you, Splenda might be made from sugar, it might behave like sugar, but no sugar I've ever had tasted faintly bitter and made the center of my tongue go numb. A cookie made with Splenda is like a handjob from a hot chick with hands of fine-grit sandpaper.

There is no content or structure to this rant except to lament once again that some folks just don't know what good food is.

End transmission.

Brad DeLong writes:

A Theory About Cinnamon and Recipes

It strikes me that most of the standard recipes come from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the relative price of cinnamon was much higher than it is today. Thus it seems likely that most such inherited recipes economize on cinnamon to what is now an undue degree.

Proposal: triple the cinnamon in everything I cook for the next three months.

I will report back.

DeLong is an economist, and his theory makes sense only as long as you accept his givens as true. In this case, DeLong takes it as a given that the strength and quality of cinnamon has remained constant as its price has fluctuated. In truth, cinammon of a hundred years ago is completely different from cinnamon today.

True cinnamon comes from Sri Lanka and environs, and has been a popular cooking spice since antiquity. It features heavily in the cuisines of the Middle East and India, and all the cookbooks I have from along the silk road contain at least a few classic recipes requiring the spice. Indeed, one of my favorite cookbooks, Lynn Rosetto Kaspar's The Splendid Table includes many stunning savory Medieval dishes from the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, many of which feature stunning quantities of cinnamon as well at nutmeg, a cooking tradition adapted from Arab traditions. Cinnamon was (of course) a mark of wealth, and the amounts called for reveal these recipes as feast dishes for the upper class, not regular home cooking for paisanos.

But here's the rub. The cinnamon we use today is far more likely to be cassia, the bark of a tree that tastes similar to cinnamon but comes from Mexico, among other places. Two things to note: cassia's flavor is far less intense than true cinnamon's and lacks the other's warmth and depth; and cassia is far, far cheaper than the real thing. Hence, DeLong is mistaking what's at work here. In reality, he is seeing the transition from cinnamon to cassia as the dominant player in American cooking, with the concomitant drop in price and rise in volume required to flavor our food.

If you can find some true Vietnamese cinnamon (I order it special from a spice distributor), do the following: bake two batches of sugar cookies,one batch containing Vietnamese cinnamon and the other an equal amount of supermarket-brand "cinnamon." Unless your supermarket is really going for the gold, the "true" cinnamon cookies will have much more cinnamon flavor than the others. Also, as with other ground spices, you should only keep on hand what you plan to use in the next six months or so. Like coffee, ground spices oxidize over time and lose their flavor. If you, like I, have a parent or in-law with a cabinet full of curry powder and giant plastic containers of cinnamon purchased in the early 1980s, do them a favor the next time you're home and throw them out on the sly.

(By the way, the cinnamon sticks available in the USA are all cassia, and should not be ground for use as ground cinnamon. This is the only instance in which grinding your own spices fresh is not recommeneded. The bark of the cassia tree contains varying amounts of flavor depending on where it comes from, and by definintion cinnamon sticks are losers for two reasons: they are most likely to contain fewer essential oils overall; and the flavor will vary depending on which of the bark's layers are ground - with sticks you're getting a lot of just plain sawdust. Not that they don't have their uses, mind, but only as stirrers for your cider drink.)

For the interested, here is a wikipedia entry on cinnamon.

For the really interested, buy On Food And Cooking by Harold McGee, a fascinating and comprehensive one-volume encyclopedia of food, chemistry, and techniques. His discussion of the chemical compounds characteristic of various herbs and spices (e.g. cinammon's flavor deriving in part from cinnamaldehyde and also from small amounts of linalool (lily fragrance) and eugenol (clove), among others) makes creative mixing of flavors easy - just find spices containing complementary compounds and go to town! If you're a geek, that is.

Either way, good luck to Brad DeLong. Although his premises may be wrong, bumping up the "cinnamon" in his recipes will make them more as the writers intended. However, caution is warranted. Too much cinnamon can be unpalatably bitter and harsh tasting, and can have emetic properties besides. I know the former is true for cassia as well, and I really don't care to hear about experiments with the latter.

It's like clockwork.

Every year, right along with the weepy encomiums to some Jewish schmoe who got nailed up for trying to get people to be nice to each other and the kitchy, dippy foolishness that drips from every tree, building, and television in these United States, come the nattering nabobs of negativity.

"Christmas is too religious!" "It's too secular!" It's too commercial!" "It's unfair to atheists!" It's unfair to people without families!" "It's unfair to me!"

Any more it's really just part of the season. Suicides rise. Families split. Hospitals fill up with busted legs, busted lips, and bitter husbands full of spite and too much eggnog. In fact, even in years where the pundits don't crow about some fatuous "War on Christmas," its almost fashionable to talk the season down like we're all super cool teenagers trying to distance ourselves from our oh-so-humiliating parents.

Personally I mostly dig Christmas. Sure, I don't so much love the six-week shopping season and all the glitter and chintz, but I guess other people do so live and let live is what I say. But do I love spending time with my family, opening mystery boxes fulla loot, and gorging myself on turkey, cookies, and wine. C'mon! That's a good time!

Nevertheless I am in the habit of being deeply negative about Christmas music. In general, I hate it. Aside from a few beautiful classics (mostly hymns) Christmas music as a genre is the cloying and nasty auditory cousin of cat pee, of puke and disinfectant, of unwashed old ladies wearing far too much perfume crammed into a tiny hot room. Worse yet, I can't just block it out. My mind doesn't work that way. If it's playing, I'm listening, and if I'm listening, I'm suffering a little. Poor me, right?

It's easy for me to get worked up about this; I just ride in on the surf of everyone else's bitterness. But even as I can get carried away in paroxysms of fury at "Little Drummer Boy" and techno editions of "Sleigh Ride," I think it is also worth remembering (for me and you alike) that Christmas means more things than fatty rum drinks, crammed full malls and caterwauled carols. You've got to find the good and try to ignore the bad.

In his faux-memoir Lake Wobegon Days, Garrison Keillor writes about the town's Catholic priest, Father Emil, who foregoes a second finger of brandy on Christmas eve because

[e]ven on Christmas Eve, one finger is the correct portion, by him, and it's a miserable mistake to think that two would be twice as good, and three even better, or putting both hands around the bottle and climbing into it. That's no Christmas. The true Christmas bathes every little thing in light and makes one cookie a token, one candle, one simple pageant more wonderful than anything seen on stage or screen.

Christmas is indeed more special the more simple things are kept. If you're a Christian, better to focus on the simple beauty of Jesus' life work, and celebrate the joys of family and friends. If you're not, it is a season to find solace in friends or family, or the simple pleasures of solitary contemplation and silly Santa headgear.

This all comes to mind because a few weeks ago there crossed my desk a modest and gentle-hearted Christmas music compilation that I actually enjoy, curated by maverick filmmaker John Waters. Waters' films are like a grotesque inverse of Keillor's pretty small-town jewel boxes. Of course, where Keillor is likely to serve the Lundbjergs a plate of tuna hotdish in that slow tweed voice of his, Waters is more likely to serve Divine a dogshit sandwich in a nasal Baltimore honk. Still, at the core of their best works is a sweetness that makes them kindred souls.

A John Waters Christmas (which came out in 2004) is a slam-dunk collection of Christmas music that fully embraces the cheesy, kitschy side as well as the sour grudging side of the holiday, and spikes both with a bracing dose of the bizarre.

Given that it is John Waters it's a no brainer that he would have included something from sweet-natured freakshow Tiny Tim, in this case "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." Tiny Tim's Disney counterparts The Chipmunks show up too, with a loopy version of "Sleigh Ride" that hammers the irritating little tune into your head with brio.

Even better than these already high points of kidding-or-not Christmasania are the less well known selections. Waters has managed to track down a rare copy of the legendary "Santa Claus is a Black Man" by Teddy Vann, and he includes it as the capper on a wide-ranging set of outsider Christmas music ranging from the high camp of the sad-orphan ballad "Happy Birthday Jesus (A Child's Prayer)" and treacly story "Little Mary Christmas" to the bitter empty-wallet rant of "Here Comes Fatty Claus" (with the immortal chorus "Here comes fatty with his sack of shit"). These are songs you can't believe were ever recorded, much less released to the public. Were the artists serious? Could they possibly have been serious? If so, what were they thinking?

However, Waters didn't put this together to mock Christmas with chintzy foolishness but to celebrate the myriad ways people approach Christmas, positive and negative. Thus in the midst of all the demented novelty sing-alongs and syrupy dying-orphan songs there is time for real beauty. "First Snowfall," a fuzzy winter instrumental by the Chicago hipster band The Coctails, is a gorgeous meditation full of mellow vibraphone and Theremin. This quiet piece is complemented by the classic doo-wop of "Christmas Time is Here" by Stormy Weather and the Motown sound of "I Wish You A Merry Christmas" by Big Dee Irwin and Little Eva. All three are high-quality and perfectly serious well wishes for the season. Moreover, let's be frank. Despite his bizarre voice and appearance Tiny Tim wasn't putting us on, and his rendition of "Rudolph" is as sweet and true as can be.

This is the key. No matter how outrageous Waters' films may sometimes be, they retain an innocence at their heart that disarms all the layers of winking irony that viewers lay on top.

If he had been joking the joke would have fallen flat. But he's not, and A John Waters Christmas ends up a surprisingly fine collection of Christmas novelties.

With his Baltimore charm, his little mustache, and his sly smirky face, Waters is the master of the tacky. Yet he truly loves tackiness for the modest sincerity at its core. Like his movies, A John Waters Christmas sums up all the varied sides of the Christmas season from the bitter to the lovely (not so much with the Jesus-y, but plenty of folks have that covered already) with a gentle winsome cheeriness.

This collection deserves to be on the shelf of anyone with a sweet-cynical bent and a penchant for the weird. This will be in my holiday rotation for years and years to come.

(This post also appears at blogcritics.org.)

It actually causes me physical pain to write the words down in electrons and photons, since I am a godless liberal from Massachusetts, but.... "Merry Christmas" to all the Ministry's readers. I surely hate our freedom almost as much as I hate our American values. And the baby Jesus. But Merry Christmas to all! (It burns! Oh, the burning!)

(Feh.)

In keeping with the spirit of the season, and as a special lagniappe to our Buckethead, here is (via BoingBoing), a wonderful page full of images of aerospace-themed New Years greeting cards from the former Soviet Union.

Via James of Hell in a Handbasket, we find this heartwarming (and braineating) Christmas poem.

Andrew Ian Dodge points us to a Cthulhu Wiki. Pretty cool, even though the top level navigation is weak. Bonus: actual Lovecraft short stories, like "The Rats in the Walls."

This week's Carnival of the Recipes is up, replete with holiday party recipe goodness!

By way of the Claremont Institute blog and someone I can't remember, we find Judge Bork on Original Intent and the Martini:

Martini's Founding Fathers: Original Intent Debatable

Eric Felten's essay on the dry martini is itself near-perfect ("Don't Forget the Vermouth," Leisure & Arts, Pursuits, Dec. 10). His allusion to constitutional jurisprudence is faulty, however, since neither in law nor martinis can we know the subjective "original intent" of the Founding Fathers. As to martinis, the intent may have been to ease man's passage through this vale of tears or, less admirably, to employ the tactic of "candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker."

What counts in mixology is the "original understanding" of the martini's essence by those who first consumed it. The essence remains unaltered but allows proportions to evolve as circumstances change. Mr. Felten's "near-perfect martini" is the same in principle as the "original-understanding martini" and therefore its legitimate descendant. Such latter-day travesties as the chocolate martini and the raspberry martini, on the other hand, are the work of activist bartenders.

Mr. Felten lapses into heresy only once. He prefers the olive to the lemon peel because the former is a "snack." Dropping a snack into a classic drink is like garnishing filet mignon with ketchup. The correct response when offered an olive is, "When I want a salad, I'll ask for it."

-Robert H. Bork
The Hudson Institute
Washington

I couldn't agree more.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Star Wars Wiki. See you in several hours when you emerge.

As has become a holiday tradition since the arrival of my son, my wife and I are eagerly planning for maximally efficient use of the time that we will be able to foist our beloved offspring off on relatives and go do something by ourselves. This time is especially precious, since it involves free day care. When you have paid babysitters, you don't really relax, and you certainly can't take your time. A better situation is using friends as babysitters - more confidence in the outcome and a much lower cost. Of course, you can't dip into that well too often, or it will go dry. And even then, you don't dawdle much while out and about.

Leaving the spawn with grandma, however, is ideal. Grandma would likely kill for the opportunity to spend time with her only grandchild. Grandma is upset when we take the boy back. So time constraints are no concern. And grandma probably takes better - or at least more attentive - care of the boy than we do. For these reasons, holidays are special.

Mrs. Buckethead and I both love movies. And not just the part where reflected photons representing ordered patterns of information enter our brains through the mediation of our retinas. That, we can experience in the comfort of our living room. We love going to the movies. We love the big screen, and the speakers set to eleven (twelve during the previews), and the black juju beans stuck to our feet, and the tacky feel of the floor thanks to geological layers of spilled sody-pop and rancid popcorn butter, and the shriveled up hot dogs, stale nachos, flat fountain drinks and highly ergonomic yet mysteriously uncomfortable seating. We love old theaters with ratty curtains and antediluvian movie posters, and we love the new ones with stadium seating and torus screens. We love watching previews, and the wonderful sense of possibility and wonder that only one in a thousand movies ever deliver.

Therefore, every holiday we drive out to Ohio, spend some time with the family, inhale some turkey, and bolt for the nearest cinema.

So there I was, trolling the internet, reading movie reviews and contemplating the ideal mix of movies to take in. Kong is certainly at the top of the list. We will probably have the opportunity to see one, and possibly two, additional movies. Which to choose? Narnia has been on the radar screen for quite a while now, and so I was checking out what people thought of it. Generally positive, I found. Most reviewers felt that the director did an admirable job of representing the Christian themes of the book without descending into preachiness.

Then I ran across this. A review in the (surprise!) UK Guardian entitled, "Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion." I can see that those who are not religious, or at least not Christian, would not be 'for' the Christian allegory that is central to the novel, and therefore the movie. Well enough. Christian themes abound in many great works of literature, and most people who aren't disposed by faith toward those themes learn to get along, just as Christian readers by and large learn to cope with the non-Christian themes that can be found damn near everywhere else.

But this is a rather strong reaction:

Narnia is a strange blend of magic, myth and Christianity, some of it brilliantly fantastical and richly imaginative, some (the clunking allegory) toe-curlingly, cringingly awful.

...Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to? Poor child Edmund, to blame for everything, must bear the full weight of a guilt only Christians know how to inflict, with a twisted knife to the heart. Every one of those thorns, the nuns used to tell my mother, is hammered into Jesus's holy head every day that you don't eat your greens or say your prayers when you are told. So the resurrected Aslan gives Edmund a long, life-changing talking-to high up on the rocks out of our earshot. When the poor boy comes back down with the sacred lion's breath upon him he is transformed unrecognisably into a Stepford brother, well and truly purged.

...Why? Because here in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America - that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right.

Does any of this matter? Not really. Most children will never notice. But adults who wince at the worst elements of Christian belief may need a sickbag handy for the most religiose scenes. The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw gives the film five stars and says, "There is no need for anyone to get into a PC huff about its Christian allegory." Well, here's my huff.

Lewis said he hoped the book would soften-up religious reflexes and "make it easier for children to accept Christianity when they met it later in life." ...So Lewis weaves his dreams to invade children's minds with Christian iconography that is part fairytale wonder and joy - but heavily laden with guilt, blame, sacrifice and a suffering that is dark with emotional sadism.

The fact that a movie that is, more than anything else, a children's fantasy, woudl provoke this sort of vitriol kind of amazes me. Especially in light of the fact that the writer also acknowledges that

Most British children will be utterly clueless about any message beyond the age-old mythic battle between good and evil. Most of the fairy story works as well as any Norse saga, pagan legend or modern fantasy, so only the minority who are familiar with Christian iconography will see Jesus in the lion. After all, 43% of people in Britain in a recent poll couldn't say what Easter celebrated. Among the young - apart from those in faith schools - that number must be considerably higher. Ask art galleries: they now have to write the story of every religious painting on the label as people no longer know what "agony in the garden", "deposition", "transfiguration" or "ascension" mean. This may be regrettable cultural ignorance, but it means Aslan will stay just a lion to most movie-goers.

This hatred of Christianity is ironic, too considering that most of the left, and in all likelihood the author of this review, would condemn any who criticised, say, Islam in even the mildest terms. And even more ironic when that Islam, in its extreme form, has resulted in much death and violence - actions antithetical to the Christianity she attacks.

Remarkable.

Because you can starve, you slacker.

The US Supreme Court has ruled that the gubmint can seize a person's social security benefits to pay off defaulted federal student loans. Sorry, brother- it's dog food and the Goodwill dumpster for you until those loans are settled.*

There is no mention though of being able to opt in to a social security payoff plan. I figure it like this: I don't believe I'm getting one red centavo of social security to begin with. Either the whole program will be defunct, or the retirement age will be like 104 before I can apply. So I would welcome an opportunity to affirm, today, that I authorize the US Department of Education to take the x-thousand I owe you out of my social security benefits.

Please?

Let me keep the coupla hundred I pay you monthly and you can have everything I've paid in so far. That'll about even us right up, and if it doesn't, help yourself to the difference when it's my time to collect.

*Apropos of an earlier post, the man in this suit worked at the post office yet was carrying $77k in student loans. To paraphrase Bluto Blutarski, "Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the fucking post office."

As the other Ministers are aware, I'm running about 0-30 on trying to get a new, better job. A job so new and better it would allow me to leave both my crappy part-time gig and my somewhat OK full-time position far, far behind.

But after so many interviews, so many resumes, and so much bullshit all 'round I'm just tired. Bone tired. I'm tired of working so much, I'm tired of getting nowhere, and I'm tired of being desperate for something to shake loose. I'm of a mindset now such that when the ad for the New England Tractor Trailer School comes on tv, and the burly fella asks, "How do 18 wheels of adventure sound?", I say to myself, "Wwwwelll...he's probably asking rhetorically, but still...not so very bad, maybe."

Don't misunderstand: I have nothing against people who actually work for a living. Truck drivers, heavy equipment operators, soldiers, and anyone else who has a bona fide reason to be tired at the end of the day has my respect. But what I'm thinking now is that it's utterly contrary to everything I was taught: the less capable took the vocational courses, went to the voke high school, and ended up driving trucks all their lives. The talented kids took the college prep curriculum, with advanced-placement everything, and went to "college". That was when "college" meant a single, mysterious place of enlightenment and fun and learning, not at all what it actually was. Is.

The college bound were to look forward to big salaries doing...something, presumably garnering absurd salaries simply by virtue of being educated, while the vocationally-minded could look forward to soulless drudgery, finally ending up as morsels for Moloch. And every person, written tract, or other signal from broader society reinforced that attitude. Shit, even the stupid board game Life, remember that? Remember how you had very little hope of making the big $$ and "winning" unless you went to college? Even the little kids playing that game got it.

Only problem is that none of it is true.

Do you know who, in your neighborhood- yes *your* neighborhood- is most likely to have a net worth of $1 million? It's the plumber. Do you know how much CDL drivers are making? About 1/3 less than I do, but I've been in my current position for five years, and I was in school for six before that. CDL drivers have been earning in that 11(!) year span.

So with all this stuff floating around in my head- the sense of failure, the frustration of not being able to improve my lot- I also ran headlong into the deeply rooted idea that I'm supposed to be rewarded with the big money and fabulous prizes by virtue of my education. Real life since commencement, however, ought to have dug up, peeled, boiled, and devoured that deeply rooted idea by now, but there it was.

And that got me thinking, again, for the thousandth time, whether all that education was really worth it. Yes it was cool to learn and all, but I could have read all those books for nothing had I been that eager to learn. And what did I really learn? In all that time, I could have been earning. At the very least, I could've cut my losses with a BA and found work; as it was, I had to have a master's, so started my working life at the age of 28(!) with decent student loans.

So I want to ask you, all seven Ministry readers: was college, either undergraduate or grad school, worth it for you? Do you regret going? Would you have been better off now if you had then been earning instead of learning?

Since it's Friday, the day of cat- and beer-blogging, and since I have nothing of particular global import to share with the Ministry's eager readership, here is the menu for the dinner I'm making for a few friends tomorrow. I'm Martha freaking Stewart, but with man-parts.

NOV-TOBERFEST
Theme: Rotten and delicious, a tribute to tame bacteria

Appetizers
Cheese plate with New England and European cheeses
Homemade sourdough bread
Flammekueche (Alsatian flatbread topped with bacon, caramelized onion, and cheeses)
Assorted olives
Homemade beer

Soup course
Vegetarian borscht

Main event
Home-cured sauerkraut with various pork products
Home-cured sauerkraut without various pork products
Potatoes with parsley sauce
Buttered peas
Reisling or Beaujolais Nouveau or more of that homemade beer

Dessert
Individual molten chocolate cakes
Vermont maple-sugar vodka and Vermont milk-sugar vodka

Plane fare will totally be worth every penny. I promise.

Via crony NDR (who's apparently my main supplier for material these days), I find this impossibly highbrow poll which is nevertheless enticing.

1) Jane Austen or Charles Dickens? oh, please.... Dickens!
2) Who is your favorite George Eliot character? Having never cracked the spine on a George Eliot novel, I'm going to have to say "the man with the most interesting facial hair."
3) What is your favorite play by Sophocles? jeez... having suffered through a crushing production of Antigone in college (I was the sound tech and therefore yoked to the mast of that sinking ship), Oedipus Rex.
4) What is your favorite play by Euripides? The Bacchae, natch.
5) What is your favorite play by Shakespeare? Hamlet.
6) Plato or Aristotle? Aristotle
7) Name two movies that most people have probably never seen that you would highly recommend. "Red Rock West," starring Nicholas Cage in his pre-action indie mode, Lara Flynn Boyle, and the greatest regular-guy character actor of all time, J.T. Walsh. "The Day The Clown Cried," starring Jerry Lewis as an unlucky clown imprisoned by the Nazis who puts on the clown suit once again to entertain Jewish children in the camp before leading them onto the train to Auschwitz. Intended to be what "Life is Beautiful" eventually was, it is so repugnant in execution and repellent in message that Jerry Lewis has one copy - the last copy - locked away in his vault where nobody can ever screen it again. I have made it one of my life's goals to see this movie.
8) Foucault's Pendulum or The Name of the Rose? Tie.
9) Tea or Coffee? Tie.
10) In your opinion, the least appreciated great thinker in history is: yours truly, followed by (the historical, aphoristic, Gospel of Thomas) Jesus and Erasmus.

My wife and I have a tradition called "assing around," which is an activity most people call "doin' nothin'." Our life has been very hectic of late thanks to Mrs. Johno's new job and the numerous social obligations that go along with it, and we haven't had very many days to just ass around in several months.

Since today was a free day, we determined to spend it just assing around. And I am. Having cooked up a batch of waffles for brunch, made up our lunches for the upcoming work week, and brewed a quick five gallons of stout, I can proudly say that today, compared to my typical weekend day obligations, I have indeed done comparatively nothing. Having finished all that in enough time to catch the thrilling second half of the Patriots-Dolphins game, I am now ready to settle in for a long evening of malt beverages, unhealthy snacks, and copious pigskin spectation culminating in the Browns-Steelers showdown later this evening. Go Browns, and take the Cavaliers with you!

Anyway. To business. (To business!... what... that isn't a toast?)

Brew #5
Naumkeag Dry Stout

2 cans (6.6 lbs) John Bull liquid light malt extract
1 lb. flaked barley
3/4 lb. roasted unmalted barley
1/4 lb. chocolate malt
2.25 oz. Northern Brewer hop pellets (7.5% AAU) (bittering)
1 package Safale S-33 yeast

Steeped grains in muslin bag in 1 gal filtered water at 165 degrees +/- 5 degrees for 1 hour. Brought 2 gal filtered water to boil, added steeping liquid and malt extract, and returned to boil. Added all the hops and started the boil clock. 60 minutes later removed brewpot to bathtub with 25 lbs ice in water. Added a sanitized 2-liter bottle of frozen water to brewpot itself. Got wort down to 95 degrees in 20 minutes flat. Poured wort through mesh strainer into fermenter bucket and added 2 gal refrigerated distilled water and a little under 1 gallon room temperature distilled water to make a tad over 5 gallons of wort at a perfect 70 degrees. Poured back and forth between pot and bucket to aerate. Reconstituted yeast in 85 degree water and let stand 20 minutes. Pitched yeast at 80 degrees.

This is going to be a very dry, heavy bodied stout. That much I know. Flaked barley adds mostly starch and protein to the mix for a heavy mouthfeel, and 3/4 lbs roasted barley is definitely going to bring an up-front burnt/roasty flavor. The 1/4 lb of chocolate malt isn't enough to bring much sweetness, but I expect it to lighten the overwhelming darkness and add depth and complexity to the mix. I love Northern Brewer hops, and I expect I'll need fully as many as I used to balance out the size of the malt profile. I also love S-33 yeast, which I am now told is the Whitbread strain. Whitbread ales are some of my favorites from when I was in England, and so it's no surprise I dig the yeast. It results in a fairly dry ale with mild but noticeable characteristic ale flavors. In my porter, the S-33 resulted in a beer that tastes more like a Schwarzbeir (black lager) than an ale, and I expect a similar result in the stout, just writ much larger. Oooh... I can't wait!! I'm hopping up and down like a little girl.

Yesterday I bottled my Very Special Bitter, which is gonna be great, and next week I expect to make another porter with a similar grainbill but different hops and yeast. It's funny... when you have five gallons of beer ready to drink, you think "jesus... I need to make more." When you have ten gallons of beer ready to drink, you think "jesus, this is gonna go fast... I need to make more." When you have fifteen gallons of beer... you get the picture. The best part is giving it away. Anybody want a beer?

[wik] What the hell happened?? I have a good beer herer, but it sure ain't a stout! Much more light-bodied and bitter than I expected. Not that that's a bad thing, mind, but I was after Stout. Changes for next time: use two mesh bags and a very large pot for steeping, to give the barley room to get around and extract all them starches! Use fewer bittering hops! Use American or Irish ale yeast... the Safale 33 is good, but has too much character. So a failure, but an eminently drinkable failure.

[alsø wik] What the hell happened, part deux?? After five months in the bottle, now that I have all of three bottles left, suddenly I have a thick, rich, roasty stout on my hands. I still didn't manage to hit my mark, but this recipe has potential. I NOW think that 1/2 lb chocolate malt, 1/4 lb crystal 120 or so, 1/2 lb roasted unmalted barley, and that full pound of flaked barley would be a good grainbill. Oh, and I should add a pound or so of dry malt extract as well, to add some alcohol to balance out the flavors. If I do this, the 33 is still a good yeast to go with, or alternately, say, Edme or London Ale yeast. Something with a little mineral character, crispness, and some nice soft generic esters. Mmmmmm...

Have you ever woken up in the morning with an all-consuming craving for goose fat, pork fat, and a gigantic heaping platter of dubious yet thrilling sausages and fermented cabbage? Have you ever woken up in the morning with an all-consuming craving for the mother of all choucroutes garni?

(Except: what the hell is with "authentic" sauerkraut recipes using g-d d-mn frankfurters and nothing else?! Weisswurst! Blutwurst! Knockwurst! Boudin blanc! Pork chops! Smoked pork! Kielbasa! Duck! Bacon! Ham hocks! And then-- and only then-- hot dogs. Jesus christ!!)

More like this. Ahhhhhh.

(Someone get me a glass of Reisling, stat. I'm going into palpitations here.)

Via time-wasting Ted, this wonderful quiz:

What action hero are you?

You scored as Batman, the Dark Knight. As the Dark Knight of Gotham, Batman is a vigilante who deals out his own brand of justice to the criminals and corrupt of the city. He follows his own code and is often misunderstood. He has few friends or allies, but finds comfort in his cause.

For once, a accurate web quiz. It ranked those heroes more or as I would have if someone simply asked me to list those superheroes by order of preference. My only quibble? I would have ranked Maximus a bit higher. At least I wouldn't be wearing a skirt like Rocket Jones.