I have a hard enough time on a normal airplane….
Failed Ice Cream
I’m not sure what happened. It seems to me to be a conspiracy of some sort.
Actually, in my attempt to make ice cream for the first time in a long time, I had a failure that I really can’t explain. I followed the recipe to the letter, one from the very reliable How To Cook Everything, but I think what happened was I used too much fat– six egg yolks, half-n-half, and then cream. I haven’t used that many eggs in the past, and I have also usually made ice cream with just half-n-half.
In any event, this “failure” has inspired me to try again (stay tuned for more details), and it has also at least resulted in a rich and chocolatey drink.
Actually, instead of worrying about Ypsi politics…
… I think I’ll play with this.
I’m thinking of four-letter word that begins with “F”
Okay, perhaps I just need to go to bed, but I thought this was pretty, uh, f-ing funny:
“The Big Lebowski – F_cking Short Version,” via YouTube:
Beer Watcher II: Bottling (sideways)
It was bottling day yesterday at Bill HD’s for our latest batch of “hefeweizen” beer. This picture shows Bill (seated) and Steve B running sanitizer through all of the bottles– remember, clean is your friend when bottling beer– but the process for getting the beer in there is the same. Beer comes out of the bucket, which the beer has been transfered into from the carboy (see video below), it’s put into bottles, it’s capped, and we wait.
I think it’s fair to say that we’re all a bit more nervous about this batch than the last one we made. On first taste, this beer tastes… well… okay, but we hope that it benefits from a bit of bottle aging. At least two weeks. Since we’ll be out of the country in two weeks (and I don’t think it’s worthwhile to take a homebrew with me to Germany), my share of the loot will be even more aged. On the up-side though, there doesn’t appear to be any problems from the previously mentioned “blow-off,” which we thought might contaminate the batch. Our assumption is that if there was some sort of problem, the beer would taste like poo. And while it isn’t a great beer, it isn’t a poo-flavor, either.
I took some video with my camera, but I also learned a valuable lesson I will apply on our upcoming vacation: if I turn the camera sideways, I end up with sideways video. So, to properly view this footage, please turn your computer and/or monitor 90 degrees counter-clockwise before viewing.
It’s not particularly exciting footage, either; it’s beer being siphoned through a tube from the carboy to the fermenting bucket (aka “ale pail”), from which we will later bottle. Twenty-two seconds worth, and it’s 6.6 MB. I would have included the other movie I took, but Steve B. and Bill kept making rude gestures. Bastards….
Speaking of the “usefulness” of the Internet…
A must-see I came across via Boing-Boing: Star Trek meets “Knights of the Round Table:”
Okay, okay, I’ll go mow the lawn. Finally….
What do hoboes and John “I’m a PC” Hodgeman have in common?
I wasn’t aware of this:
John Hodgeman, of The Daily Show and those Mac vs. PC commercials fame, wrote a book called The Areas of My Expertise, in which, among many other things, he discusses hoboes. This hoboe discussion lead to this web site about hoboes and hoboe issues.
Who says that the Internet is a waste of time?
Seriously? The Who?
I got a notice from Ticketmaster alerting me to the availability of tickets for the upcoming tour of The Who. This raises a couple of questions for me:
- If half of the original members of a band are dead, can you really call the band the original name? In other words, I could go with “Roger and Pete on tour,” (which is kind of what Jimmy Page and Robert Plant did a few years ago), and I was willing to go with The Who sans Keith Moon (mostly because that is how I was introduced to The Who as a youth), but also without John Entwistle?
- It seems to me that if you are a band known for (among other things) breaking stuff on stage and in hotel rooms, wishing in a song to die before getting old, and other generally childish bits of behavior, then you shouldn’t be allowed to go on tour when you do indeed get old.
- Having said all that, I really liked The Who as a kid. It was my first big rock show, the first time that they were over-the-hill…. 25 years ago. Am I going to this round of shows, which will be making a stop in Detroit? Won’t get fooled again, baby….
Just in case the home beer brewing doesn’t work out…
… there’s always this advice for making cheap wine. As the writer emphasizes, this is “hobo wine.” No doubt.
Strange little IQ Test
A couple of days ago, I found this little card, about the size of a business card, stuck under the windshield wiper of my car. The front of it looks like this:
Okay, now try working through it before looking at the other side.
Keep working….
Keep working….
Finished?
Okay, flip it over:
Weird, huh? I think I got this little gift as a result of the various lefty bumper-stickers on the back of my car….