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Sorry for the complete lapse in postings, but things have been cuh-razy up ins. I spent most of last week in Philadelphia, and then we all had to take turns fighting off the cold that Charles gave us. (It manifested itself, in his case, as pinkeye, which was REALLY EXTRA FUN TIMES! We didn’t get the eye problem, but I’m still fighting the chest congestion and stuffy head.)
In order to placate the masses however, I have something FAAAAR better than my bizarre ravings: pictures of Charles and his cronies! Enjoy.
I spent most of last week driving to and from King of Prussia, PA (hence the lack of posts), and here is what I can report to you: I-476 and I-76 are the worst system of roads of any place I’ve been to, and include both Staten Island and Boston in that statement. Pretty much everyone in southeast Pennsylvania, totalling several million people, uses one or both of those roads EVERY DAY, and yet they have only two lanes of traffic in each direction. It’s worth noting that this is the same number of lanes that route 87 has through Mason County, Texas, which has, as of the 2000 census, 3738 people in it. Even at 10am the traffic is stop-and-go. I find this infuriating.
I talked it over with my pops, and he says that The Blue Route (I-476) took so long to be built that, while it was completed in 1991, the original planning for it took place in the mid-50s, when much fewer people lived along it. And from the Wikipedia article on the subject:
As one of the most controversial Interstate Highways in Pennsylvania, construction of I-476 began in 1967, but was not completed until 1991 between MacDade Blvd.(Exit 1) and Interstate 76(Exit 16), and until 1992 between Germantown Pike east/Chemical Rd.(Exit 19) and Interstate 276 (PA Turnpike), due to litigation between the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and several communities in the road’s path over environmental concerns. An agreement in 1985 led to many environmental compromises in the road’s design, including a downsized four-lane design south of Pennsylvania Route 3, ramp meters, and federal scenic route status, prohibiting the erection of advertisement billboards along the entire freeway portion. While the redesigned highway was largely well-received, the constriction to four lanes has led to bottleneck conditions in the area, and many communities that originally opposed the road have now called for its widening.
The people in those communities should simply be set afire.
What the heck, man. How is it possible that I can have gained 10 pounds but still completely fit into all my pants? Am I gaining fat in my knees and feet? What the crap?
What makes it all the more annoying is that I thought I had been reasonably good for the last month. I’m not actively dieting, but I figured I’d just eat plenty of vegetables and get lots of exercise, so I’ve been biking 2 or 3 times a week and running occasionally. I have, however, probably been drinking too much. Stupid homemade beer!
I guess it’s possible I gained some muscle, but I tend to doubt it. I do want to buy a large weight-training device within the next few months, though, so hopefully I can develop pecs instead of boobs. I know, I’ve tried it before at the gym, but here’s the thing: the gym sucks. There’s annoying other people there that I have to share machines with, plus now that I don’t work in Newark the school gym (which I have free access to ’cause Sarah works for UD and all) isn’t even remotely convenient anymore. I guess I could JOIN a gym, but…well, for the price of a year’s gym membership, which I probably won’t use much, I can get a Weider Crossbow (about $400-500) and get ripped when I want in the comfort of my own home. Heck YES, says the goat!
Hopefully it won’t turn into a coat rack.
The downside of riding one’s bike a lot, of course, is that if one is redunkulously clumsy, as I am, one occasionally falls off. On Saturday I took a nice long ride around New Castle, and made a wrong turn. Once I realized that the road I’d chosen didn’t go anywhere, I had to make a U-turn in a tight space, lost my balance, and couldn’t get my foot out of the clipless pedal in time to prevent me banging my elbow and skinning my knee. So now I have a skinned knee for the first time since approximately 1993. Gotta tell you, it’s pretty old-school.
Oh, the beer. Well, the first batch came back with mixed results, and I’m not sure why. Overall the beer is good, but certain bottles are a bit skunky. I thought the bottles were sufficiently clean, but who knows. It’s all a mystery. I went ahead and bought a new beer supply anyway, a “Robust Porter.” I definitely did a better job with the boiling and fermenting process, so hopefully it turns out to be a phatty batch. I bottled it last week, so I’ll know by the end of the month. (And quite possibly by then will have bottled yet another 2 cases. Woo unlimited beer supply!)
I try to avoid commenting on current events, because I really don’t know what I’m talking about most of the time, and because you find better commentary other places. Really, you could find better commentary on MySpace, I think. So the bad news is, I can’t let the I-35W Bridge Collapse pass without some sort of comment. The good news is that the comment is coming from someone else!
From James Lileks, probably the best conservative pundit/humor writer/all around amusing individual on the web today:
I’m listening to a story on the news about a man who survived the fall – then ran to help the kids on the bus. I’d guess the fellow never considered what he might do in such a situation. Never thought about it much. Who would? But then you find yourself on a bridge that’s crashed down into the Mississippi, and you’re struggling with the seat belt buckle. It works , but your hands feel thick. You’re alive – which doesn’t seem that odd, really, you’ve always been alive, so this is just different, but you have strange thoughts about insurance and a mad swirl of panic and there’s blood in your hair but you can stand – and then you see a school bus. So you go to the bus. Of course you go the bus.
Most of us would. It’s a remarkable instinct that wells up and kicks in, and it’s something you never expected to experience. As someone said about humans: We’re at our best when things are worst.
Would you have run to the bus? I’ll answer for you: yes.
Me? I dunno. There have been FAR too many times in my life when I’ve wussed out instead of confronting something that I can’t say for sure what I’d do in that situation.
What would you do?
Update: A later Lileks post on the subject:
I heard a KSTP reporter speak on the Bob Davis show this morning – he told a story about a first responder finding someone trapped in the wreckage, dying. The rescuer handed the victim a cellphone to say goodbye to loved ones.
Jesus Q. McChristus.
Having kids definitely makes one consider one’s mortality in a more concrete way. (Don’t worry, this is leading somewhere.) When you’re, say, 20 years old, no wife, no kids, the concept of death usually occurs to you, probably as you’re about to do a drunken swan dive off of a 5th floor hotel balcony into a swimming pool, but it’s very abstract, and is treated as such. The most attention you can really give it is thoughts like “When I die, I want my ashes poured over Niagara Falls” or “Dude my funeral is TOTALLY going to have a Zydeco band!”
Once kids enter the picture, the thought of one’s own death conjures up thoughts like “Do I have enough life insurance?” and “Shoot, I’d better find myself an attorney and get a will drawn up!” An unforeseen side effect, is that you find yourself occasionally wondering what it would be like if members of your immediate family, particularly (heaven forfend) your kid(s), were to die. So there have definitely been times that I’ve sat awake at 2am in one of my fairly frequent moments of insomnia and considered what it would be like to have the state troopers show up at my door one evening to tell me that HW was in an accident and … well … we’re so sorry …
::full body shiver::
It’s probably the least healthy thing I could be thinking at any time, assuming my “many worlds” and “steering” theories have a grain of truth to them. Still, I have no more control over my train of thought than I do over a collapsing bridge, if you’ll forgive the blunt reference to the topic at hand.
Anyway, the point, and you’ll have to forgive me if I turn off my FCC filter for just one graf:
<PROFANE>
At no point, up until this very afternoon, had I ever considered the thought of hearing my wife’s dying words over a FUCKING CELLPHONE. And trust me, this is different than, say, if my wife called me from a plane that terrorists were about to crash into a building. This a phone call from someone who is already fatally injured, whose eyes are already dimming, who’s finding it harder and harder to breathe, who is seeing their own blood pouring out of them like water from a leaky fucking dyke.
</PROFANE>
So here’s a REAL question: if you were fatally injured, and almost certainly dying within the next few minutes, would you CALL anyone? If so, who?
This is the worst short story ever. By me. Based on true events from Monday.
Robert didn’t think of himself as high-strung. He was a pretty relaxed individual. Which is why it was such a surprise when he killed that guy.
All he’d wanted to do was go for a bike ride. So he put his bike on the rack on his car, packed up his helmet and other associated gear, and went to work. Around lunchtime, he gathered up his stuff and changed in the bathroom.
“Damn it!” he said to himself. “I forgot a towel.” Hm. Robert was going to have to shower after the ride, but without a towel he’d have to stand around air-drying. Just then he thought, “Wait, I only live 5 miles from here. I’ll just ride home, throw a towel in my backpack, and then finish out the ride!” Good thinking, Robert.
So that is what he did. Sort of. Except for the retrieving a towel part, because Robert got all the way home and was pulling into his driveway before he realized he had forgotten his keys.
So, he spent a few minutes trying to figure out a way to break into his house, but being a security-conscious soul, every door was locked, and every window latched. “Well, that’s just great.” Robert considered his options, and realized there wasn’t much he could do. So he headed back to the office.
The sky grew ominous as he rode along route 40, and eventually turned into a torrential downpour. Robert was soaked to the bone, but didn’t slacken his 15-mile-per-hour pace. He stopped only to check his phone and make sure it wasn’t going to short out and melt or anything.
After 8 miles of being really pissed off about being stuck in the rain, Robert came back to the office, went to the bathroom and showered. He came out and prepared himself to just stand around while waiting for the water to drip off. Just then, a man came in to change for HIS workout.
“Rainy enough for you?”
So Robert beat him to death with a cycling shoe and dried himself off on the man’s pants.
Weird Dream Number 1: Saturday night, after hanging out with my college peeps, I dreamt one of them (Todd) was picking a fight in a diner with someone much larger than he. They went outside, and Todd tried a sneak attack in which he punched the guy in the junk three times, but it didn’t faze the big dude, and so Todd basically got his ass kicked for a while. Then some kind of clown showed up to break things up, and I ran outside to help, ending up putting the big guy in a choke hold that involved forcing his jaw open so far that I nearly cracked it. Later, the guy came into the diner, but it was a different guy (but the SAME GUY!), and he kept talking smack, so I put him in a choke hold again. Then later he kept talking about how he was going to find out where I lived and come over to hurt my family, so I held him against the wall with a butter knife to his throat and asked him what it was going to take to get him to go away.
Just then several naked women came in.
So the guy says I have to pose with two of the women (who somehow found some clothing to put on, meanwhile) while reading a note he handed me, that I can’t remember the exact wording of, but the gist of it was that since I was married, I was never going to have sex with these other women, and he videotaped it. I assume that mollified him, because after that I woke up.
Dream Number Two: I had gotten involved in some kind of massive benefit concert in which I was going to be the headlining act, except that I hadn’t rehearsed, didn’t have a band to back me up, and in fact hadn’t even picked any songs to perform. I did have all my instruments with me (not an insubstantial collection, at this point), so I set them up, and started asking around for people to play them.
The concert was to be outside, so at some point I wandered away from my stuff to inspect where the stage was, which was sort of in a big field with the stage set in the shade provided by a wooded bit. Then I went back to the main area and was alerted to the fact that the wooded stage was only for the warmup acts; the main attraction (me) was to be playing on the main stage nearby, which was already packed with like 40,000 people.
At some point Brian showed up and I recruited him to play bass or something. Then I woke up.
What’s wrong with me?
This may be the most rambling, disjointed post I’ve ever put on here. And that is seriously saying something.
I dreamt last night that I got my truck back. The circumstances surrounding it were vague, but for some reason I found myself at the Ford dealership, and the guy that originally sold me the truck said, “Hey you know, we have your truck outside.” And I drove off in it without having signed anything. Immediately I scratched the hood of it on some kind of post.
Anyway, I was so ecstatic to have my truck back, but I felt a great deal of guilt because somehow, despite not having signed anything, I knew it was going to cost me money that I don’t need to be wasting, since HW and I are trying to figure out how to move back up to North Wilmington. (As it turns out, most of New Castle is a cesspool. Our particular neighborhood isn’t too bad, but go 1/4 mile in any direction and the people have fewer teeth than my son. I hate to sound like a snob, but I need to move back to a place where people drive late model Camrys instead of 1993 Ford Tempos with Monza exhausts and plastic rims. Just seems like a more…intellectual environment. Plus, most of the things I do outside of work (church, drama productions, etc.) are in Wilmington, and both sets of parents are up there.) I recently got a pretty decent payraise at work, but we need to save up some serious down payment money, and also we need to prepare ourselves for the fact that our monthly mortgage+tax+insurance payment is probably going to DOUBLE.
So anyway, I felt guilty for having the truck, and was trying to figure out a way to return it. Then I found myself playing softball with a bunch of people I don’t know, and somehow I was managing them and attempting to put together a lineup card while the leadoff batter was already at the plate. At this point Sarah woke me up ’cause it was like 9:15am and I needed to get to work.
Oh, the reason I slept in until 9:15? The Brandywiners “preview night,” in which they give a bunch of tickets to current members and participants, was last night. Since they do the show in an outdoor theater at Longwood Gardens, they have to start hella late or it’s not dark enough to use the lighting system. So the show didn’t end until just after 11, and then we had to go to Applebee’s for mad delicious flava.
Oh yeah, Applebees: I used to hate that place, but now I don’t. The reason? The one by us is really really, really REALLY bad, and the one up by Longwood is less so; the Walmart-adjacent one we went to a couple times had service worse than a prison cafeteria. Plus it seems like Tyler Florence’s influence has improved the quality of the food a great deal, such that I had some kind of shrimp fettuccini and it was heck of enjoyable.
This concludes the most rambling, pointless thing I’ve typed since my 6th grade “Invent A Country” project. (Its name: “Hoyaglitchland.”)
Update: I did not get to kiss John Mayer on the mouth. All is sadness. Doubly frustrating, is that because the Tweeter Center sucks, I couldn’t get any pictures. Argh.
Our tickets said something about “NO PROFESSIONAL CAMERAS,” which kinda concerned me, but I thought, well, Canon’s own website describes the Rebel XTi as a “consumer” camera (the 30D is prosumer; the 5D is professional; and the 1D Mark III is “Holy Crap This Is Way Too Expensive To Take Out Of The Box”), and if I just put on a relatively tame lens (no monstrous zooms with lens hoods), they can’t really complain.
Incorrect.
Apparently when they say “No Professional Cameras,” they mean no detachable lenses, so despite the fact that my camera entered the building with a 50mm prime lens that wouldn’t allow me to get a shot of John any closer than “ant” view, it was confiscated (and returned later, worry not). This wouldn’t have been so troubling if the tickets had specifically said “No cameras with detachable lenses,” which would have been perfectly clear. It also would have been less annoying if they weren’t allowing people to bring in $800 Sony zoom 8MP digitals that were capable of getting pictures of the bass player’s ridiculous Village-People-Cop hat.
Anyway, we got in, and I immediately bought myself a large boring American beer, only to walk an extra 50 feet and discover they had a stand selling all kinds of quality microbrews. So my frustrations mounted. Then we got seated while James Morrison played his set, and I got even more pissed off, because the sound system at the Tweeter Center is so crappy it sounded like James was singing through a special filter designed to remove all consonants from every word. I couldn’t understand a thing. Even now I have no idea if any of his songs are any good; it might as well have been all instrumentals. I’ve heard better sound systems in an elevator.
The same goes for Ben Folds, who from what I’m told is a phenomenal musician and performer; all I can say is he has some amusing gimmicks and his songs often have pretty melodies. I’ll give him a B- because he kept throwing his piano seat at the keys, and at one point during a song he broke a piano string on a low note, immediately stopped the song, removed the string from the soundboard, handed it to a fan, and then restarted the song exactly where he’d left off.
Luckily, during his set I was able to run off and pee, and also buy a quality beer named something like “Circus Boy” or “Circus Penis,” or something. It was FANDAMNTASTIC, and I got back to my seat to listen to Ben Folds play 2 more completely unintelligible songs and then wander off to put on his neck brace (I’m assuming, since his head is roughly the same size as the rest of his body).
Honestly, the best part of the concert (up until John walked onstage) was making fun of other people with Liz. A quick rundown of the amusing people we saw:
- Between 8 and 27,000 skinny little high school/early college-aged skanks who seriously needed to go dig a sandwich out of the trash or something before their bodies collapsed in on themselves.
- An ENORMOUSLY fat woman in a wheelchair, attended by her fat husband and 2 fat daughters, getting wheeled around while sucking on what appeared to be a quart-sized glass of rum-soaked pixie-stix-sugar. There must have been 3,000 calories in that “drink,” which sadly was probably maybe 1/5 of this woman’s daily regular intake.
- A couple thousand guys who were clearly there because their girlfriends liked John Mayer. These were the guys who were probably annoyed because they kept wanting to sit down and dorks like me wouldn’t stop standing up and screaming.
Yeah, I was screaming. John Mayer gives me happy feelings in my pants. DEAL WITH IT.
There’s not much to really say about John’s performance; he was ridiculously spectacular. It’s difficult to grasp how good a guitarist he is by just listening to his CDs; you kinda have to watch him play on TV, or live, particularly if he’s not constrained by late-night/early-morning network TV timetables. And the best part about it is that he can solo pretty extensively, but it never starts to feel like it’s gone on too long. For example: if you go to see Phish in concert, which I have, they will play maybe 8 songs, each of which is roughly 25 minutes long on average. Only one of these songs will have an identifiable melody. Usually after about 7 minutes into each song, Trey Anastasio would slow things down, and you’d realize they were launching into another 10 minute build-up leading to some kind of climax that left you feeling unsatisfied. John, on the other hand, played something like 25 songs, some of which were 5 minutes long, some of which were 10, but each extended solo was melodic and interesting and WENT SOMEWHERE. Going to a Phish concert feels like a 3 hour free-form jazz symposium at Camden County Community College; going to a John Mayer concert feels like going to a rock concert.
On the other hand, going to a Phish concert usually guarantees you a pretty boss contact high.
John didn’t quite play all my favorites, which I guess just means I’ll have to go see him again. However: not at the Tweeter Center, which has incurred my almight wrath for all times to come due to their immense suckitude.
I’m going to see John Mayer tonight with my sister, and here’s the plan: we’re going to sneak backstage, and then Liz will distract the various roadies and Ben Folds (who is apparently there in “support” of John, which I assume means he’ll just be cupping his balls during the show, which is nice in that John gets a nice little lift, and Ben Folds has something to do to keep him from actually singing) while I grab John and kiss him full on the mouth, probably with a measure of tongue.
That is my plan. Your thoughts?
Heck YES I’m making beer! What, you thought I was playing? Boo, I don’t play when it comes to Germany’s greatest invention. (Was beer invented in Germany? I should look that up. ::wikipediates:: Looks like it was invented in Mesopotamia. How about that.)
Anyway, I’d been wanting to give it a try for a while, so last Friday I headed over to How Do You Brew?, the nearest supplier of hardware and whatnot for making beer and wine. The gentleman in the shop, Joe Gallo, was EXTREMELY helpful, and I ended up staying about an hour, talking about the process and various tools. I bought the various tubs, tubes, and attachments, along with a kit containing the malt extracts and various hops and sugars. I wanted to make sure I had something super simple, that I couldn’t screw up.
Well of COURSE I screwed it up. C’mon, now.
The process starts with boiling a lot of water; various recipes call for various amounts in the initial boil. Almost all home recipes are designed to make 5 gallons of beer, but some call for you to boil all 5 gallons, some call for as little as 1 gallon of boil, and you just add the rest of the water later. This recipe called for a 2 gallon boil, and I happened to have a 2 gallon jug of spring water available, so I poured it in and gave a righteous boiling. While I did this, I filled a 7-gallon fermenter bucket with water and mixed in some sanitizer powder, and stuffed in all the various equipment that would touch the beer during the fermenting process.
When the water boiled, I poured in the two massive cans of malt extract (the kit supplies this so you don’t have to grind and steep your own grains, a complexity I may be ready for at a later date) and brought the mix back to a boil.
Here’s where I made my first mistake: the recipe was very clear about watching the pot to make sure it didn’t boil over. I took this to mean that as the boiling went on, various starches and things would make a foam on the surface that I would want to make sure didn’t spill out. So, thinking nothing of it, I dumped in the first package of hops.
Apparently hops and water and malt react violently, because roughly 2 pints of water exploded out all over my kitchen.
After the boil calmed down, I moved the pot over to another burner, because I was going to have to completely disassemble the left side of my stovetop to clean all the beer out of it. This kept me busy for about 15 minutes, and then I poured myself a large glass of gin.
The boil continued, and as boiling liquids are wont to do, much of the water steamed out into the air. I watched bemusedly, and wondered how, if I boiled this thing for an hour, I was going to end up with 5 gallons of liquid, since I appeared to be losing about a cup of water every 15 minutes (ignoring, for the moment, the quart I’d lost when the brew exploded). I pored over the directions to see if I was supposed to keep the pot covered, and could find no useful information. So I left it uncovered. Whatever. Towards the end of the boil, I threw in the last little bit of hops (very, very carefully) and began to ready the fermenter.
Unfortunately, I had made another sizeable mistake: the recipe called for me to use 5 gallons of spring water (tap water, being chlorinated, would kill the yeast), which I didn’t have. It also called for me to rapidly cool the mixture before adding the yeast, by sitting the fermenter full of liquid in a tub of ice until it got down to about 70 degrees; I did have plenty of ice, due to buying roughly 12 bags of it for a party and saving 4 7-pounders in my freezer. I remembered in the Good Eats episode on beermaking, Alton used an amount of spring water PLUS an amount of ice IN THE FERMENTER and that way immediately cooled the mixture to a temperature that wouldn’t kill the yeast. Brilliant!
My mistake was made in misjudging the ratio of ice to water. I was SURE that Alton had put all the water in the initial boil, and used about 3 bags of ice plus a few additional pint bottles of water. So I put two bags of ice in the fermenter and poured the hot wort in; it rapidly cooled to about 40 degrees and didn’t come close to melting all the ice. Dang; now I had overcooled liquid that was still a gallon short of the amount of water! I managed to stuff the rest of the ice in, and poured in some pints of heated spring water, but it still wouldn’t completely melt. Dang; I feared if I added the yeast to this mixture, the cold would screw it up somehow. Oh well; let’s put the cover on and sit it aside, and after rehearsal I’ll come back and it’ll be a nice toasty 70 degrees and I can pitch the yeast.
So I left, and came back. The ice still hadn’t melted. Hells bells, as my father would say. Oh well. I went ahead and bloomed the yeast anyway, poured it in, and put the top on. I had some problems getting the bubbler (a little device that allows CO2 to escape the bucket, but doesn’t let air in) working, and in the end I think it was allowing air into the bucket for the better part of a day, so hopefully the beer doesn’t taste like a monkey crapped in it. I measured the specific gravity of the beer on Saturday, and it was about 1.040, about where it was supposed to be; as of today, it’s at 1.010. The recipe says it should get down to 1.007 or so, so I’ll keep an eye on it and hopefully get it into bottles this weekend, after which it needs to “age” for about 3 weeks. Yay beer!
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