Archive for the ‘Mixology’ Category

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I went back to Ohio, but my city was gone.

Monday, July 15th, 2013

Well, not really “gone”. I hadn’t been back to Ohio for nine years, and it amazed me somewhat both how much and how little has changed.

For example, there’s an entire grocery chain that I don’t remember from my last trip…that takes the Discover card and cash. No Visa/AmEx/MasterCard/Diner’s Club, not even debt cards with a PIN, just cash and Discover. Who came up with this idea?

On the other hand, the tractor tire store that was a landmark on the way to Grandma’s place is still there, after 40 something years. And Grandma’s place still feels remote from everything, even though there’s major strip centers at the end of her road, and even though much of the land was sold off over the past few years (and now has houses sitting on it).

And the old NASA hanger is still visible from the airport. That was another landmark for us kids. (My dad worked there, back when it was still the Lewis Research Center, before it was renamed “NASA John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field“. Which is a mouthful. Not that I’m bitter or anything over the renaming; by gosh, if anyone deserved to have a NASA facility named after him, it was John Glenn.)

This is shaping up to be a long post, and sort of “stream of consciousness”, so I’m going to put the rest of it behind a jump. Before I do, here’s Grandma’s obituary, just for the record.

(more…)

Posted in Admin, Android, Apple, Books, Clippings, Food, Geek, Guns, Lizards, Mixology, Obits, Photography, Planes, Reptiles, Thanks, Travel | 3 Comments »

Random notes: June 18, 2013.

Tuesday, June 18th, 2013

I was all set to snark on this NYT headline:

For Its Latest Beer, a Craft Brewer Chooses an Unlikely Pairing: Archaeology

After all, craft brewers going back and doing beer anthropology isn’t exactly a new thing.

However, the paper of record gets a pass from me, because the brewer in question is Great Lakes Brewing Company, a personal favorite of mine.

Enlisting the help of archaeologists at the University of Chicago, the company has been trying for more than year to replicate a 5,000-year-old Sumerian beer using only clay vessels and a wooden spoon.

Sam Kellner believed his son had been sexually abused by a Hasidic cantor. Mr. Kellner lobbied the Brooklyn DA to prosecute the cantor. As a result, he was shunned by his synagogue and other members of the Hasidic community.

In April 2011, after the district attorney’s office gained a conviction against that cantor, Baruch Lebovits, the prosecutors turned around and obtained an indictment of Mr. Kellner. They said, based on a secret tape and the grand jury testimony of a prominent Satmar supporter of Mr. Lebovits, that he had tried to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from Mr. Lebovits.

The conviction of Mr. Lebovits was reversed:

Even today, Alan M. Dershowitz, one of Mr. Lebovits’s lawyers, portrays Mr. Kellner and other prominent whistle-blowers as extortionists. “We see Kellner as a leader of a major extortion ring,” he said in an interview. “He is not a do-gooder.”

On the other hand:

Two weeks ago, I talked with the three-member rabbinical court — known as a Beit Din — in Monsey. These rabbis rarely grant interviews, but spoke now of their moral obligation. Their community for too long has resisted coming to grips with sexual abuse.

They view Mr. Kellner as a brave pioneer. He did not seek out witnesses at random; rather their court, with the help of local leaders in Williamsburg, gave him the name of a victim.

“Lebovits is known to have a long history” of sexual abuse, Rabbi Chaim Flohr said. But Mr. Lebovits has powerful supporters, and people are fearful, he added.

The NYT spin on this is that Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn DA, gets a lot of political support from the Hasidic community, and is therefore very deferential to their wishes. But if he is so deferential, why did his office bring the case in the first place? It seems like he could easily have ducked the prosecution by claiming the evidence was insufficient or some other issue. The NYT‘s timeline is a little fuzzy, but I’m picking up at least an implication that Hynes’s office had the tape in their possession at the time of the Lebovits trial.

(Also, if you go back to the NYT article on the reversal of the Lebovits conviction, the extortion plot is mentioned in passing by Dershowitz. But the actual reason given by the appeals court for overturning the conviction is not the alleged extortion plot, but a failure by the prosecution to turn over evidence to the defense in a timely fashion.)

Posted in Clippings, History, Law, Mixology | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: February 18, 2013.

Monday, February 18th, 2013

Barnaby Conrad Jr. — bullfighter, bon vivant, portrait artist, saloonkeeper to the stars, author of 36 books, and founder of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, led a life that was anything but boring. Ninety years old, he died Tuesday in his Carpinteria home after a battle with congestive heart disease.

Conrad wrote two books that I liked very much: The Martini: An Illustrated History of an American Classic and Absinthe: History in a Bottle.

I have very little to say about Mindy McCready except this: the number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Mixology, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Who would have thought it?

Thursday, February 7th, 2013

You can get botulism from prison wine, aka “pruno“, aka “that stuff that’s frequently fermented in a cell block toilet or other places just as disgusting”.

(You know where else you can get alcohol from, with less risk of botulism? Sourdough starter. No, really; the liquid that separates out and rises to the top if you leave it sit is somewhere between 12% and 14% alcohol. I haven’t tried drinking any of it, but I suspect it tastes a little better than pruno.)

Posted in Bread, Clippings, Food, Geek, Mixology | Comments Closed

The last dive bar.

Friday, December 14th, 2012

There’s an interesting article in today’s LAT about the King Eddy Saloon. The King Eddy opened in 1933 and was a favorite bar for folks like John Fante,  James M. Cain, and Charles Bukowski. When it first opened, it was in a commercial district that has since evolved into Skid Row.

The bar itself, shaped in a square, commands the center of the room, with cracked vinyl banquettes lining the perimeter. A glassed-in smoking space is set off to the side. Behind the bar is a tiny fluorescent-lighted kitchen where prepackaged burgers, pizza and sandwiches are heated in a microwave. A beer and burrito would set a person back only $4.

($4 beer and burritos? On a busy night, this place must smell like a mustard gas attack.)

The property that the King Eddy sits on has changed ownership. The new owners (the “Acme Bar Group”) plan to remodel the bar. The current “regulars” are convinced that the remodel is going to push them out – no more $4 beer and burritos – in favor of a more “yuppie” crowd.

Which may very well be true. I don’t live in LA, so I’m not sure I can comment with authority. It’s worth noting that the King Eddy is located in a residential hotel, that there are more residential hotels in the area, and that “a moratorium prohibits the conversion of residential hotels in the area to upscale housing until 2063”. So it isn’t like this area is going to become gentrified any time in the near future. It does seem to me that a “yuppie” bar on Skid Row is going to be a hard sell.

Posted in Clippings, Mixology | Comments Closed

Sunday morning link roundup.

Sunday, October 14th, 2012

Some of these are things I promised other people I’d send them a link to, some of these are things I wanted to note in passing.

Here’s the Merlin Mann “Flocked Up” video from the “Worst Website Ever” panel at SXSW 2008. This is where “your (x) is one of the three to fifteen most important things to us” comes from.

HouChron article about women in the brewing profession, complete with photos of the Saint Arnold Brewing Company’s female brewer. The photos in the slide show aren’t quite as good as the one they ran on the front page – the one that made me click through to the article – but they do make me want to try more of the fine products of the company.

I haven’t linked this previously, since many of the people in my circle had already seen it. It turns out that a few haven’t, so: the Ars Technica “I am calling you from Windows” story about Indian “technical support” scammers.

The first set of verdicts came down late Friday in the Austin nightclub trial. (Previously.) I’d also commented that I didn’t think the trial was going all that well for the prosecution: as a matter of fact, the defense rested without presenting any evidence or calling any witnesses, which you have to figure is a sign of confidence that the prosecution does not have a case.

Two of the three Yassine brothers were found guilty of money laundering: Hussain Ali, known as “Mike”, and Hadi. Mohammed Ali Yassine, aka “Steve” was acquitted on the money laundering charges; however, the Statesman says he’s going to be tried on drug charges later.

Basically the only evidence the prosecution had was the word of one of the Yassine cousins, who was a paid federal informer, and who confessed to drug use and theft under oath. My record so far in predicting trial results is mediocre at best, but I would not be shocked to see the convictions overturned on appeal.

And I didn’t actually bring this up, but it came up, and would be useful to link, so: the Wired article about “Cow Clicker”.

Posted in Clippings, Geek, Law, Mixology | 2 Comments »

After action report: Las Vegas, NV 2012.

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012

I don’t have much new to report as far as equipment, but I do have a couple of notes on existing stuff. DEFCON for the past few years has run a “secure” network using MSCHAPv2 authentication.

  1. This worked fine on the Kindle Fire. I was able to log in and browse whenever the network was working. However, there seems to be some sort of bug in the Kindle Fire: after a certain amount of time, the wifi setting on the Fire would either stop responding completely (on/off switch wouldn’t do anything) or would immediately crash (with an error message) as soon as I tried to open the setting.
  2. The default Network Manager on Ubuntu 12.04 would not connect to the “secure” network at all, but just constantly brought up the authentication prompt. Google turned up more than a few reports of Ubuntu issues with Network Manager and MS-CHAPv2 authenticated networks, so it seems this is a known issue. I worked around this by downloading and installing wicd, which was able to connect. However, wicd does not appear to save network settings, so every time I wanted to connect to the network, I had to re-enter the configuration.

(In general, I’m seeing more and more problems with project e and Ubuntu 12.04. I suspect some of these may be issues caused by doing several upgrade installs in succession, so I may try doing a backup of /home, reformatting project e, and doing a scratch install and restore of 12.04.)

Food: I had excellent meals at Lotus of Siam (the sea bass drunken noodles) and at Piero’s Italian Cuisine, which is a very old-school Italian restaurant near the convention center.

That was some swell osso bucco. And I don’t think I paid much more for it than I paid for osso bucco at Ciola’s when they were still open.

I also broke with one of my rules and went back to Shabu Shabu Paradise again. In my defense:

  1. I really like these people and want them to be enormously successful.
  2. I haven’t been there since my last trip with Andrew and Mike the Musicologist.
  3. I kind of have a tiny little crush on the waitress. Who, by the way, recognized me from my previous visits, even though I was clean-shaven last time. (I think she’s married to the chef, so nothing’s going to come of that.)

I also had a good meal at Mint Indian Bistro, and very good breakfasts at Blueberry Hill on Flamingo and The Egg and I on Sahara. (The rule doesn’t apply to breakfast, as it is very very hard to find good breakfast places that aren’t casino buffets, Denny’s, or IHOPs in Vegas. If anybody does have a recommendation for a good breakfast place in Las Vegas, please feel free to drop it into the comments.)

I’ve been driving past Hofbräuhaus Las Vegas for years now, considering giving them a try and then not going after all. This time, thanks to Tam inspiring a German food craving in me, I thought I’d give it a shot. The verdict: meh. It wasn’t a horrible meal. The service was pleasant and efficient. But it seemed like I paid a fair amount of money for pretty average food. Walburg is better and cheaper and really not that bad a drive if I go there from work. (You’d be hard-pressed to spend $50+ at Walburg without either being too full to move or too drunk to drive.)

I drove past Flavor Flav’s House of Flavor several times (it is very close to my preferred ATM in Las Vegas, which, in turn, is far enough away from DEFCON that I’m not any more paranoid than usual about using that ATM), and I regret not getting a photo.

I did get some photos (but they didn’t come out well) of “Lynyrd Skynyrd BBQ & Beer“. BBQ and beer? I can haz both?

(By the way, I was never offered a full can of soda on any of my Southwest flights. But I did get a full can of drinking water between PHX and AUS.)

Thanks to: Everyone at DEFCON 20 (staff, goons, presenters, and attendees), the folks at Shabu Shabu Paradise, Lotus of Siam, the Egg and I, Blueberry Hill, and Mint Indian Bistro, the Mob Museum, Amber Unicorn Books, Greyhound’s Books, Borepatch for linky-love, and anyone else I missed.

Posted in Books, DEFCON 20, Food, Kindleing, linux, Mixology, project_e, Travel | 2 Comments »

Quote of the day.

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012

“I am a martini man, myself. Over six weeks we used up forty-six bottles of gin and a little less than half a bottle of vermouth. I like martinis dry.”
—Robert Ruark, Horn of the Hunter

(In case you were wondering, 46 bottles over six weeks works out to seven and 2/3rds bottles a week, or a little over a bottle of gin a day. That’s split three ways, though: Ruark, his wife, and their guide. Figuring 750 ml bottles, that’s close to 9.2 ounces of gin a day each. Ruark mentions at one point that they kill the bottle with three drinks each, so that’s something like three ounces of gin per drink. Plus unknown amounts of beer and brandy.)

(I enjoy reading Ruark. I wish more of his work were still in print; I found Horn at one of those used bookstores in Vegas, and spent downtime during the trip reading it.

But I get a funny feeling whenever Ruark talks about drinking, like in the last two chapters of The Old Man and the Boy, or as he does a few paragraphs later in Horn: “I can drink two bottles of wine at lunch in Rome or Paris or Madrid, top it off with three brandies, and feel marvelous all day. A glass of wine at lunch, two glasses at dinner, in New York, would keep me in bed with the miseries for half a week.”)

(This is, of course, a man who would die at 49 of “complications of cirrhosis of the liver”.)

Posted in Books, Guns, Mixology, Ruark | Comments Closed

The mimes are food for the bums underground…

Monday, July 16th, 2012

New York, New York!

Several of the city’s most troubled hospitals are partially or completely uninsured for malpractice, state records show, forgoing what is considered a standard safeguard across the country.

This list includes Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, about which we have written previously.

In 2009, Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, in Bushwick, had $50,000 in its malpractice fund; in 2010, the amount put aside to cover claims had dwindled to “0,” according to its financial statements. Yet the hospital listed professional liabilities of $37 million. Ramon Rodriguez, the chief executive, declined to comment.

On the other hand, are these hospitals better off without insurance?

“Malpractice insurance is a lawsuit magnet,” said a former hospital administrator who did not want to be named to avoid upsetting potential employers. Malpractice lawyers said that underinsured hospitals put them in a tricky position.
“There is some arm-twisting,” said Alan Fuchsberg, a personal injury lawyer in Manhattan, as plaintiffs are told that they will end up with nothing and push the hospitals into bankruptcy if they do not “just take the little bit” that is offered to them.

Today is the 100th anniversary of the murder of Herman Rosenthal. Mr. Rosenthal was a small time crook who ran several gambling dens, and was allegedly paying off politicians and cops. One of the cops he was alleged to be bribing was Lieutenant Charles Becker of the vice squad; Lt. Becker raided Rosenthal’s establishment anyway, leading to a heated dispute between the two gentlemen.

This dispute ended with Mr. Rosenthal being shot outside a Manhattan hotel. Lt. Becker was tried, convicted, had his conviction overturned on appeal (due to alleged bias by the judge in the case), retried, convicted again, and finally executed. Lt. Becker is one of a very few police officers to face the death penalty for crimes committed while a police officer. (Incidentally, I still have not found an execution date for Antoinette Frank.)

The NYT has a retrospective article summarizing the case, and suggesting that Lt. Becker may have been innocent of ordering the Rosenthal murder. (There does not seem to be any question that Lt. Becker was a crooked cop; the main question is, did he order the murder, or were the killers acting independently?)

Historical note: one of the men who pinned the murder on Lt. Becker was Jack Rose. Yeah, that Jack Rose.

(Subject line hattip. Can I just mention that it is awesome that WikiQuote has an entire section of “Sam and Max: Freelance Police” quotes?)

Posted in Clippings, Law, Mixology | Comments Closed

After action report: Boise, ID.

Tuesday, June 26th, 2012

This is going to be more like a collection of random notes towards an AA report than an actual report. I do plan on a longer more thoughtful blog post later; probably this weekend, if everything works out the way I want it to. (I’m waiting for something to come in, and I need to go out to my mother’s place to take some pictures.)

  • You can do blog posts from the Kindle Fire. I wouldn’t recommend it, and there are some issues with the WordPress interface on the Kindle, but in a pinch it can be done. And it is better than trying to post from a smart phone.
  • On the other hand, I was at dinner one night with some friends. One of them was talking about a new gun he’d bought, but wasn’t sure what variant it was. He (and several other people at the table) were very impressed when I whipped out the Kindle Fire open to the appropriate section of the Standard Catalog of Smith & Wesson 3rd Edition. At least one person said, “That’s it. I’ve got to get one.” Yeah, I like having the Kindle Fire.
  • Speaking of books, I started and finished The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl on the way up. Tam has written about this book previously, and anything I could add except “go read it” would be superfluous.
  • Supposedly, according to the TSA, you no longer have to take out your laptop if it is under 12″. At least, that’s what I was told by a TSA agent in Austin (too late to do me any good) and the first TSA agent I spoke with in Boise. The second TSA agent in Boise apparently either didn’t get the memo, or the other two were wrong. Good old government ineptitude.
  • I feel obligated to link to this Oatmeal comic.
  • I had a lot of good food in Boise. Other than Bar Gernika and the Moxie Java on Chinden, I had a fantastic breakfast (as in, one of the best breakfasts I’ve ever had) at a small place called Goldy’s in downtown Boise, and a very nice meal off the prix fixe menu at Chandlers Steakhouse.
  • Speaking of Chandlers, some folks have been talking about martinis, so I thought I’d post this: Chandlers calls this “The ’33 Plymouth”; it is, of course, made with Plymouth gin and Nolly Prat vermouth. They do warn you that it takes 10 minutes to make one; I consider it worth the wait.
  • There was a restaurant near the hotel that I (sadly) did not make it to, but was notable for the carved wooden sign out front stating “Famous Prawns”. I am sufficiently geeky that whenever I saw that sign, all I could think of was “No prawns at this altitude!”
  • I find that what gets under my skin about travel these days is mostly the minor annoyances. The $3 bottled water in the room. (A buck or $1.50, maybe. That’s gas station price. And what do you suppose the gas station’s markup on bottled water is?) The lack of notepaper and envelopes. (Remember when hotels used to supply those? I know, everyone emails now, but an envelope is still useful to hold receipts and other bits of important loose paper.) Annoying WiFi networks. Etc.
  • Minor annoyances aside, I did like the staff and the facility at the Riverside Boise. (And at least the WiFi was free.) The cookie and milk/coffee break provided by the hotel on Friday was a particularly nice touch.
  • Anyone ever read Lawrence Block’s short story about Keller the hitman, “Answers to Soldier”? I understand how Keller felt about Roseburg; I feel much the same way about Boise. It reminds me a lot of Austin twenty years ago. (And, much like Keller, I have fantasies about moving almost every place I travel to. And then I end up going back to Austin…)
  • I was reliably informed that on Thursday (the first full day I was there, when we spent much of the afternoon tramping around the Old Idaho Penitentiary) the high was 92 degrees. Balmy by Austin standards, but the humidity was 6%. That would explain why I was drinking water like it was going out of style the whole time I was there…
  • As small town as Boise feels, it is big enough to have at least three gun stores. (There may be more, but the show host recommended three specifically.) I was able to visit two: the folks at Boise Gun Company were really nice, and have a huge selection. Cliff’s Guns, Safes, and Reloading seems to be a great place for reloading supplies; they didn’t have quite the new or used selection of Boise Gun Company, but did have a couple of interesting used guns. (On the other hand, $2,000 for a Model 16-4 strikes me as high. But I didn’t try to talk them down, what with being an out-of-state resident and all.) And the staff at Cliffs was perfectly pleasant to me, thankyouverymuch.
  • Sadly, I didn’t have a chance to search for used bookstores in Boise. I did look for bookstores in Ketchum and along the route between Boise and Ketchum, but didn’t see any. Oddly enough, I also didn’t see any gun stores along the route. (They probably would have been closed on Sunday, but I was specifically looking for both gun stores and book stores, just to satisfy my curiosity.)
  • Speaking of Ketchum and the general area around it, can you say “yuppie heaven”? I suspect if you planted magnets on old Ernie’s body and placed him inside a coil of copper wire, you could provide enough power to light all of downtown Ketchum at night.
  • On the other hand, the stretch of 51/20 between I-84 and 75 is an amazing drive. This is basically 82 miles of…well, nothing, except high desert country, farms and ranches, mountains, and lots of curvy mountain road. I have a track of the route I took, and may post it later so folks can get a feel for what the country looks like.
  • I haven’t been a big KIA fan, but the rental company gave me a KIA Forte, and it turned out to be a pretty swell car. It handled well on the road, got close to 30 MPG, and felt pretty stable at 85 MPH. Plus, it had two 12V sockets, an aux input, and a USB plug up front. I haven’t checked the Consumer Reports repair records, but the Forte might be worth looking at if you’re in the market for a 4-door sedan.
  • Boise seems to have nearly as many thrift stores as Austin, Mom. I didn’t see any Goodwill stores, though; the majority of thrift stores seemed to be affiliated with the “Idaho Youth Ranch“.

Posted in Beef, Books, Cars, Food, Geek, Guns, Kindleing, Mixology | Comments Closed

And speaking of drinking…

Wednesday, March 14th, 2012

…the NYT on one of my favorite drinks, Irish coffee.

With recipe. Just for the record, here’s Law Dog’s recipe. If you know how to search, you can find at least part of Larry Niven’s “Adrienne and Irish Cofffee” in Google Books, but you really should go buy Playgrounds of the Mind. (I’ve always liked Niven much better as a short story writer and essayist than as a novelist.)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Mixology | Comments Closed

Important safety tip. (#11 in a series)

Wednesday, March 14th, 2012

This has been covered on FARK, and my angle on it may be more of a legal tip than a safety one.

However.

While I am opposed to drinking and driving, it helps your court case if you can say you drank something reasonable and innocent sounding. “I had a Grasshopper.” Grasshopper. How threatening does that sound? “I had two Sidecars.” Nice, mellow, classic drink. Gentlemen drink Sidecars. Even “I had two Manhattans” or “I had three Negronis” doesn’t sound too bad.

But when the testimony in court is that you ordered eight of something called a “Mind Eraser”, that doesn’t look so good. Just a suggestion. If you plan to get your s–t f–ked up, you should consider a designated driver and something that doesn’t sound threatening. A nice Long Island Iced Tea or eight, perhaps.

Posted in Clippings, Law, Mixology, Safety | 2 Comments »

Please pass the popcorn.

Tuesday, February 21st, 2012

And by “popcorn”, I mean “Popcorn Sutton’s Tennessee White Whiskey”.

Microdistilleries are now legal in Cocke County, Tennessee. And a guy named Jamey Grosser is making whiskey in the style of the late great Popcorn Sutton.

Interestingly, one of Grosser’s partners in the venture is Hank Williams, Jr.

Posted in Clippings, Mixology, Music | Comments Closed

A lot like Christmas watch.

Monday, December 5th, 2011

I was doing some Christmas shopping over at ThinkGeek, and stumbled across an item I had not seen before: the make your own Pruno kit.

Yes, they don’t promote it that way, but isn’t that really what the product is?

How long before we see the ThinkGeek “Make your own AR-15 lower” kit?

(No, I didn’t order one. No, I’m not asking for one for Christmas.)

Posted in Mixology | Comments Closed

A fool lies here who tried to hustle the yeast.

Thursday, October 6th, 2011

Interesting piece in the LAT about Bacardi, the specific strain of yeast they use to make rum, and how the Bacardi family played “keep away” when Castro took power.

Posted in Clippings, History, Mixology | Comments Closed

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