Category: Life

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The Beer Watcher II: Wheat Beer

We (meaning me, Bill H-D, and Steve B) started another batch of beer yesterday morning, a wheat beer recipe from “All Things Beer” called “Williamston Wheat.” Compared to the first season of the beer watcher, a recipe that involved moss, grain bags, multiple applications of hops, etc., etc., this recipe was ridiculously easy:

7 lbs Wheat/Barley malt extract
1 oz Saaz hops
Wyeast 3056 or Munton’s Ale dry yeast
3/4 cup priming sugar and caps

Directions:

Add the wheat/barley malt extract and 1 ounce of hops to 1 1/2 gallons of water and boil for 1 hour.

Cool down the wort, put it in the fermenter with 3 1/2 gallons water, pitch the yeast.

That’s it. Compared to last time, this beer practically makes itself.

I was late, and Steve B and Bill H-D already did the most active steps of this beer, which was boiling the water and adding the malt and the hops. So my roll here really was watching, especially since Steve and Bill spent a fair amount of time moving some furniture out to the driveway since there was a yard sale in progress. And actually, I only half-watched; I spent more time trying to figure out a new WordPress set-up.

Two amusing things happened in all of this that are photo-worthy, but unfortunately, the batteries in my camera died. One of the great fears of home-brewing (perhaps the only fear) is that of the dreaded boil-over, which is a danger when you add the syrupy malt extract. But Bill was really not worried about it because he had a new pot for cooking up the wort this time, a five gallon rig. The water wasn’t quite up to temprature, so he put on the lid, and, worry free with the largeness of the pot, we sat around at the kitchen table and chatted.

We heard the boil-over first. Bill and Steve B sprang into action, removed the lid, turned down the burner (we had some debate as to whether or not the electric element of a stove could properly be called a “burner”), and stirred. Tragedy was probably averted, but a lot of the hops boiled up and onto the sides of the pot. So I guess the test will be in the tasting, about a month or so from now (I think about a month).

The other photo-worthy moment involved Bill spilling enough of the ice water we were using for chilling the wort on himself to require a change of clothes before lunch.

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What not to eat

I’m not entirely sure why, but this guy who keeps a blog called The Last Angry Young Man has embarked on a week where he has decided to eat nothing but monkey chow. He is keeping track of his adventures (complete with videos!) at a web site called The Monkey Chow Diaries. Funny stuff, and it is another one of those things to write in a memo to myself: don’t eat monkey chow.

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This Week at the Movies

I don’t normally write movie review-type posts, but we had the experience of seeing the X-Men: The Last Stand in the theater and The Squid and The Whale at home the other night. Here are some thoughts, complete with spoilers, so if you don’t want to be, ah, spoiled, quit reading.

First, an extra credit question: name the Academy Award winning actress who is in both movies (see the end for the answer).

Okay, first the biggie, the X-Men movie:

  • This was a “family movie night” since we had rented the first two earlier in the winter and they seemed to go over well. I think this third one was perhaps a little more intense than the other two, but Will seems to have survived.
  • On the plus side: the effects are cool, shit blows up real good, it’s damn loud, etc. In other words, it’s certainly a big theater movie, which is perhaps why the box office has been so big. But I was once again reminded of just how unpleasant it can be to go see a movie like this in the theater. The place was packed and so, of course, sitting behind us was a family of idiots narrating the film to each other. It wasn’t so bad during the loud parts, but the quiet parts could have been a bit more, well, quiet. Anyway, if I were to do it over, I would have seen this at about 11 am on a Tuesday instead.
  • I’m sorry, but I could never get over the fact that Kelsey “Fraiser Crane” Grammer is in this one. Fraiser I mean Grammer plays Dr. Hank McCoy (what does this say about mutants and/or the likes of me that about half of the mutants are doctors or professors?) who is the U.S. Secretary of Mutant Affairs (or some dumb title) and whose mutation is that he looks like a big blue gorilla— though, I will grant you, he does turn out to be a bad-ass fighter. The voice is bad enough; what makes matters worse is that Fraiser –oops, I mean Hank– spends much of the movie wearing a suit and tie and even reading glasses. So basically, Grammer’s portrayal here is exactly like a big hairy blue Fraiser. I half expected to see David Hyde Pierce make a screen appearance as a mutant who looks like a yellow turtle or something.
  • There are more mixed metaphors here than an eskimo fire fighter watching a rattlesnake convention in St. Peter’s Basilica. You’ve got the whole mutant=terrorist kind of thing, the idea of viruses, diseases/disabilities that aren’t really diseases/disabilities, etc., etc., etc. Best not to think about these things too much and just enjoy shit blowing up and Fraiser as a blue gorilla.
  • An example of a bad metaphor: I heard some NPR report where one of the writers was claiming they were trying to make the mutant’s right/choice to a decision to being “cured” analogous to women’s rights/choice to have the choice of abortion. Which is why, said this writer, there were protests outside the clinics where mutants were being vaccinated. This just doesn’t work for me. I mean, it seems obvious to me that if you’re a mutant and you have a cool mutation (you can control the weather, fly, shoot flames, turn stuff to ice, make the world blow up, etc.), then you don’t want to be cured. On the other hand, if you have a mutation that sucks (you kill anyone you touch, you’re a big blue gorilla, etc.), then you’d want the cure. I don’t see how this is a metaphor for the more complex decision about abortion.
  • Given that about half the characters get killed off (the professor, Scott, Mystique, in the end Jean, etc.), it seems to me that there must have been some sort of contract negotiation where the actors and the suits got together and the actors said something like “Okay, okay, OKAY already. We’ll do one more. But JUST one!”

I have much less to say about The Squid and The Whale. This is most certainly not a family film– we watched this the other night after Will went to bed. It’s a very good movie about a washed-up novelist who is in the midst of an ugly divorce from his wife, who just happens to be an up and coming writer herself, and also about their two sons who have quite different perspectives on the whole business. It’s one of those comedy/drama flicks– a dramedy? a comrama?– that really was kind of “Oscar bait” in the way it was performed and filmed and paced. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m kind of surprised it didn’t get any nominations– at least I don’t think it did.

And, once again, it’s an example of a movie not to see in the theater. Since it isn’t damn loud and since shit does not blow up real good, this is the kind of movie that can really only be ruined by a family of idiots seated behind you. Unless seen at a more “serious” movie venue like the Michigan Theater, this is the kind of movie best experienced on DVD in the comfort of one’s home. Go rent it if you haven’t seen it yet.

Extra credit answer: Why, it’s none other than Anna Paquin, all grown up.

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How Wal-Mart might prove that two “wrongs” sometimes makes a “right”

The New York Times has a story today about how Wal-Mart wants to start selling a lot more organic groceries. And, because Wal-Mart is such a bloated monster of a retailer, if it demands that food companies produce more organic products and produce them at a lower price, then food companies will have to produce more organic products. As the article says,

Some organic food advocates applaud the development, saying Wal-Mart’s efforts will help expand the amount of land that is farmed organically and the quantities of organic food available to the public.

But others say the initiative will ultimately hurt organic farmers, will lower standards for the production of organic food and will undercut the environmental benefits of organic farming.

We’ll see; but if the evil Wal-Mart’s bullying demand for more organic processing means a change in the way food is manufactured, I’d say that’s a good thing.

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Steve’s Birthday Week, Part 3: More Chicago fun (or, Thai-Thai!)

I would have liked to have had posted this message while I was still in Chicago, but time was short and, even more important, Internet access was shitty. You’d expect different in a big city like Chicago, but I had a hard time getting a free wireless connection, even at a Panera’s that promised it. It worked one day, kind of, the next day fine, and the third day not at all.

Anyway, in brief, here’s what I did on Wednesday, which was more or less my “day off” before my part of the conference activities began in earnest:

After spending a fair amount of the morning grading essays for my online class, I hiked down to the Tribune Tower to see my friend Bruce, who works there. He and I have known each other since freshman year in college, which I guess was 22 years ago now. Jeesh, that’s depressing; I was a freshman before most of our current first year students were born.

Anyway, we had a lovely lunch at a sort of yuppie Thai restaurant in that sort of yuppie/touristy neighborhood near the Trib Tower and the Magnificent Mile. I had a Pad Thai with some kind of fish that was pretty darn tasty. But hey, what do I know about Thai food, other than I like it and, because Annette isn’t so fond of it, I don’t tend to eat it that much. We talked some business, we talked some sports (Bruce is crushing me in the NCAA Basketball tourney as far as picks go), we talked family, etc.

On my walk back to the hotel, I went through Millenium Park, which is right off of Michigan and just north of the Art Institute. I can’t remember the last time I was in Chicago, but this was new to me, and pretty darn cool. If you follow the link above, you can see the real photographs, but I have two here from the camera phone that turned out pretty good if you ask me.

This is a picture of Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate,” what the web site describes as a “110-ton elliptical sculpture is forged of a seamless series of highly polished stainless steel plates, which reflect the city’s famous skyline and the clouds above.” It’s pretty cool, but I was a little disappointed to find that the bottom part of the sculpture, which you are supposed to be able to walk under and such, was closed off– you can kind of see it in this picture, I think. The blue line on “the bean” (as it is popularly known) is tape, and underneath it is a crew polishing the thing.

This is “The Crown Fountain,” which was designed by Jaume Plensa. Basically, it’s two big glass towers which project these enormous video faces. “Weather permitting,” as they say, water comes spitting out where the mouth is. Also very cool, and it looked even more cool when I ended up taking a cab ride by it at night.

I went back to the hotel and did some more grading, and then it was time to meet up with my friends Troy and Lisa. I picked Troy up at his downtown office, and let me just say that driving around downtown Chicago (really, any very large city) is a bit like an elaborate video game. Judging by some of the quasi-illegal/questionable things I did, it appears to me you get three lives.

Anyway, we went out to their house, which is on the Chicago-side of the Chicago/Oak Park line. A really neat neighborhood with lots of “Chicago Bungalows,” a house style I hadn’t heard of before. Troy and Lisa don’t have one of these, but their house is brick and of a similar 1930’s era. We went out for my second Thai meal of the day, one decidedly different from the yuppie-fied lunch. This place was clean and no frills, and while I think you could get Pad Thai, we all ended up with selections quite a bit different from that– crispy omelette (which was shockingly orangish-red), a soup with coconut milk in it– I believe it’s called Tom Ka Gai– spicy chicken and beef, little egg roll-like things, etc. Very very tasty.

Thanks again for the hospitality, folks.

As for the rest of my trip: it was conference/work stuff pretty much all day on Thursday (that’s “official blog” stuff), a bit of conference stuff Friday morning, and then back home. Despite the fact that I was out until well after 2 am on Thursday, I am up this early after not being awake off and on for the last couple of hours.

I have always heard old people need less sleep….

Anyway, happy birthday to me. To wrap up my birthday week, I’m hanging out with Will today (while Annette gets caught up on school stuff) and then we’re all going out for fancy Italian tonight.

Slight Update:

Troy emailed me to let me know the restaurant we went (and that is just down the street from them, too) is Amarind’s and here’s a review.