One of us is a cigar stand/And one of us is a lovely blue incandescent guillotine
Labels: photo
Rolling Stone has Jack Black's celebrity playlist. What bums me out is that when you click to listen, you need to install some player, and then you don't even get to hear the World Saxophone Quartet. I was really looking forward to it!
So what is your pick for word of the year? You can vote at Merriam-Webster online. I highly recommend "macaca", since it pretty much singlehandedly swung the Senate to the Democrats. What other word can lay claim to such influence?
Good win by the Pats today. Ugly, but good. I think they are finally starting to settle in. I guess that says something about me as a fan that my team is 8-3 and I'm only now starting to think that they are pretty good. We Pats fans have been pretty spoiled the past few years. If you had told me in 2000 that they would win three Super Bowls in the next 4 years, that they would come to be seen as one of the dominant franchises in the NFL, with their 3rd string backup quaterback drafted in he 6th round as one of the top five players in the league, I would have thought you were crazy. I'm feeling pretty good about the rest of the season.
Labels: sports
Ann and I had a chance to go out to David Copperfield's last night, a bar near her parents' apartment in NYC that has a pretty extensive beer list. They had just tapped a keg of Bigfoot, and I am assuming it is one of this year's, although I can't be sure. It sure tasted fresh, and it reminded me just what an amazing beer it is on draught. Bear Republic Hop Rod Rye is really tasty too, but Arcadia Hopmouth Double IPA is kinda bad. I was glad our waitress let me have a sample of that one before I ordered an entire pint.
Labels: beer
Ann and I went to see Borat on Wednesday. Oh my god. I haven't laughed that hard in a long, long time - I almost died during the wrestling scene. Highly recommended. His website is pretty great, too.
Labels: movie
The Native Americans at Dartmouth are angry about the fact that the University of North Dakota Fighting Sioux are coming to play in the annual New Years hockey tournament. The athletic director wrote a letter of apology to the student nespaper about this. Normally, something like this would end there, but imagine my surprise when my favorite sports blog, Deadspin has a post about the controversy. Of course, they didn't take the complaints very seriously.
Labels: sports
Wow...here's a great video of Keith Olbermann going off on President Bush for his misguided comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam.
A few months ago, Ann picked up a book for me at the used book store: The 50 Greatest Beers in the World by Stuart Kallen. It was published in 1997. Here are his top 20 beers (BeerAdvocate score in parenthesis):
Labels: beer
Brewed up a batch of beer today. I am aiming for a hoppy foreign extra stout - the starting gravity was 1.068 (yes, I finally bought a thief to check my gravity), which should give me an ABV of about 6.7% and the IBUs calculated out to be about 67. Hops were Northern Brewer/Bullion for bittering (why these two? Because the recipe I used as a starting point called for them), and Cascades for aroma/flavor. I'm probably going to dry hop with Cascades as well - but not the crappy locally grown Cascades I tried a few months ago. I'll let you know how it turns out, although chances are if you are reading this, you'll get a chance to try it.
Labels: beer
Big news everyone! Ann and I have decided where we will live after I graduate. Check it out!
For Malkmus lovers only:
Tonight at Beer Club we went to Poverty Lane Orchards to have a private tour with the head cider maker from Farnum Hill Ciders. It was fascinating - I've been on so many beer tours that they really have become redundant, but this was a whole new ball game. They grow apples at this orchard that no one else in America grows, just for use in their hard cider. We got to taste unblended hard cider straight out of the barrel - so delicious. One of the most interesting tours I've been on - it isn't every day when the tour guide mouth-siphons product out of a fermenter and pours you a sample.
Labels: beer
Ann is having a girls night out tonight with Laurie, Rachel and Laurence at the Tip Top Cafe in White River Jct. So my activity for the evening is burning a bunch of live shows I have downloaded in the past year that I've never got around to. Phish, Ryan Adams, Wilco, MMW, Built To Spill, Pavement, Uncle Tupelo, GRAB - in all it is around 10GB of losslessly compressed music that has been taking up space on my hard drive for a long time. Luckily I have a surplus 48x Firewire CD-RW drive that I took home from the help to help out - if only I had a faster computer to decompress the .shn and .flac files I'd be done in no time.
Labels: beer
Wired news has an autism quiz on their web site. I got a 21, which is above average, but way below 32 which is where most people with autism score.
Labels: quiz
I am Macaca! "Macaca" is definitely word of the year, although Ann is pushing for Brangelina. (Apologies for the lame post, I have a paper due tomorrow.)
Labels: politics
Labels: photo
Here are my picks for albums of the year, so far, from someone who hasn't heard that much new music this year:
It's rare that one gets to see media spin in action, but here is how the AP changed their story on the reaction of the stock market to the Democratic victory yesterday:
Maybe how it should really read is "the market is undergoing normal daily fluctuations, and we are desperately trying to attach political significance to it!" They are also choosing to ignore that fact that in the last 70 or so years, the market has done better under Democratic rule than Republican. But the conventional wisdom says Democrats are bad for business, so it must be so!
I'm a total election junkie. I'm reloading CNN incessantly, flipping back and forth between news channels, refreshing all of my political blogs on NetNewsWire. I'm hopeful that my choices win, but even if they don't, I think it is one of the great nights of the year.
When I was in high school, I was hired during the 1994 election by my Sociology teacher Mr. Makris to collect election results from my local ward, which were then passed on to the national media. I think it payed $20 for about 10 minutes of work. Ever since then, I've whenever I see election results I think of the thousands of high school kids hanging out at every precinct in America waiting to collect numbers. Just thought I would pass on a little bit of election trivia you may or may not know about.
Seth Mnookin makes the obvious case for Alex Gonzalez being robbed of the Gold Glove by Derek Jeter. I fucking hate everything about Jeter. Sorry for the language, but there is no other way to put it.
Ann, Sadie and I were in Concord yesterday to visit with Nana and Bob-Bob and a whole bunch of cousins (you can read all about it on the baby blog). My parents were nice enough to babysit Sadie, so Ann and I had a rare date night. We wanted to see Borat, but unfortunately it was only playing in Hooksett at inconvenient times. Ann had read in the Ale Street News that Penuche's in Concord had refocused on beer and, more importantly, became no smoking. It still has a nondescript windowless door to get downstairs, and still smells like stale smoke, but at least there is no fresh smoke. They have the best beer list I've seen in NH, including a couple Belgians (Duvel, Affligem and Lindemans), and very cheap prices - a bottle of Dogfish Head 90 minute IPA was only $4, and Spaten Octoberfest was only $3. Pretty sweet jukebox too - lots of Phish, Dead and Widespread. A good place to hang out if you are in or around Concord - much better than the Barley House.
As we were getting ready to leave, this band Otherwise showed up. They had more equipment than any other bar band that I have ever seen - huge loudspeakers, a DJ with two turntables (no microphone), a keyboardist with a vintage Hammond Organ and 3 other keyboards. I asked the keyboardist what kind of music they played. He says "It's kind of reggae, electronic, some originals, kinda jammy." After hearing that, Ann and I really wanted to stay, but unfortunately, we had to leave.
Note: political message follows. Close your browser now if you don't want to read it...
So I decided to go with a sad/scared pumpkin this year. Sadie was pretty upset and worried about it and wouldn't go near it once I lit it. She also kept talking to her teacher at day care about "Daddy pumpkin sad." Another great moment in parenting...
Horse of same color- Boston Sports Blog - Boston.com - NESN: "I can just imagine the Patriots coach watching game film of the Colts this week, cackling hysterically, smoke pluming from his lips like Max Cady in Cape Fear. No sooner had everyone finished removing their puckered lips from Manning's derriere after the Colts' win at Denver Sunday, than Tom Brady upped the ante with a four-touchdown evening at Minnesota. And just like that, the Colts are shivering in fearful anticipation.Yes, after Sunday, Peyton Manning will fall to 3-11 vs. the Patriots and just 1-8 at Foxborough. Is there any doubt of that after what we witnessed last night? The Patriots defense was relentless against the Vikings, and while Brad Johnson certainly isn't comparable to the likes of an All-Pro like Manning, we've seen enough of this script to know what to expect. And that, my friends, will be multiple angles of the Peyton pout, unsnapping his helmet in disgust after another interception. After the game, he'll want to be a good teammate, but will inevitably throw somebody under the bus."
God, I love Eric Wilbur when he gets snarky (doesn't hurt that he throws a Phish reference into 1/2 his posts). Should be a great game next weekend. I see the pats going after the Colts with the exact opposite strategy they used against the Vikings - run, run, run instead of pass, pass, pass. The Colts are ranked last in the league against the run - Dillon and Maroney are going to run all over them, the Pats will eat the clock, and Manning will have no time to score.
I'm going to try to post every day this month like Ann is trying on Sadie's blog. So expect more boring posts about sports, music and beer until December!
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