It's All Right

I'm sitting here eating my homemade gravlax (complete success, but next time I'm going to invest in thicker pieces of fish), and drinking a bottle of Westvleteren XII.  (And watching Star Gate SG-1, but you know, not everything has to be fancy.)  Stand-up on Monday went well.  And on Friday, I start my workshop of Japanese Sword Blade Forging.

This isn't exactly where I thought I'd be now when I was a kid, but it's a lot closer than I thought I'd get to it when I was a slightly younger adult.  Sometimes things work out.

Decisions, Decisions

Arrested Development on Netflix, or my new Community Season 2 DVDs?

Water, or homebrew?

Trim my beard, or be alone forever?

I tell ya, there's always another decision to make...

Apple Cider

There's a certain amount of crazy stuff going on right now, some good, some just crazy, but it's awfully nice to be able to relax in the evening with a glass of homemade apple cider.

It's rather cloudy in part because the juice I used was cloudy to begin with, and in part because it's a bit yeasty - I just fermented it right in the bottle I'm pouring it from now, with a bit of Cooper's ale yeast and about a quarter cup of additional corn sugar.  I don't think it's terribly alcoholic at all (I didn't take any measurements) but it's pleasantly fizzy and not too dry.  Just the thing.  I may even try doing it properly sometime!

Of course it isn't making any of those crazy things less crazy, but sometimes it's just about, as the poet says, "Whatever gets you through the night."

The Man We All Should Try To Be

There are many qualities I admire in people, and many (many, many, more) that I find irritating or even despicable.  It's impossible to divide the whole world neatly into two groups, one good and one bad, and still be in contact with reality.

If I were to create such a division myself, though, it would be this: Do you like answers, or hate questions?

People who like answers love questions, because asking them is how you find the answers you wanted, and one of the great things about answers is that they lead to even more questions.  It's pinball - your reward for playing well is that you get to play again, even harder.  It makes you willing, sometimes even eager, to admit you were wrong about something, because you want to be right.  It requires you to accept logic, to build ever better approximations of the world as it really is.  Wanting answers and going looking for them is what makes a skeptic, a scientist, a rebel, a gifted kid, a great artist or a friend of mine.

People who hate questions only have, want, or need one answer.  They may phrase it many ways, saying, "God did it," "The Furher commands," "Because I said so," or, "Shut up." They all mean the same thing: Stop asking questions.  It's chess - your reward for playing well is that you win, and the game is over, and you don't have to play anymore.  It makes you unwilling to ever admit you were wrong, because you always want to be right.  It requires you to bury your head in rhetoric, to build ever more elaborate illusions about what the world must be like.  Hating questions and seeking to stop others from asking them makes a denier, a zealot, a despot, a fool, a bigot, a follower, a pretentious artiste, and above all a crushing bore.

I have enjoyed a game of chess now and then, but I'd much rather play pinball.  Wouldn't you?

Unbelievable...

I just broke my new hydrometer.  There has to be a way to make these things stronger...

Maybe I'll just break down and spring for a refractometer this time; I've been meaning to get one eventually anyway.  Long tubes of thin glass that have to be balanced precariously in my dish drainer may just be a bad idea, you know?

Should It Bulge Like That?

I noticed today that my laptop battery is bulging ominously, and no longer fits properly into the machine (I took it out to get a better look at it and eventually gave up trying to get it back in). Fortunately, I am currently on vacation, and happen to be staying directly upstairs from a Mac shop where I can get it serviced. I've actually been looking into buying a new machine anyway, but I'd rather not do it right this second...

Anyway, it still runs if it's plugged in, but I'd rather not do it too much so I'm not going to be online a great deal for a little bit, I guess...

I Definitely Should Not Parent

One of my coworkers brought his grandson, I'd guess eight or nine years old, to work the other day.  He does this periodically when the little monster doesn't have school, gets him to do little jobs in the back that I will then have to clean up later.  SO helpful.

Anyway, I guess there wasn't enough to keep him occupied this time, because he kept coming around and bothering me.  I'm not a jerk, so I listened to him complain about school and answered his questions about what I was doing, and generally tolerated his mucking about as long as I didn't think he was going to hurt himself or break anything his grandpa couldn't replace.  At some point he was fooling around tying various bits of scrap wire together with wire nuts, and while I was writing up an order and calculating in my head how long it would take to untangle the knot he was creating, he commented that he was really enjoying playing with our electricity, and his parents never let him play with electricity at home.

It took a second for me to put together that he didn't know the difference between electricity and wiring.  My first thought then was to wonder whether explaining it to him would make him more or less likely to accidentally fry himself.  In the end we established that he knew enough only to play with "electricity" that wasn't connected to anything, which struck me as a pretty poor safety standard, so I tried to reinforce his parents admonitions with some stories about my own electrically-induced injuries when I realized two things:

1. This kid has been hounding me all day about what I'm doing, what my tools are, etc.  The last thing that will keep him from electrocuting himself is hearing that I'd done it.
2. I wouldn't be the person I am now, or have the job he was bugging me at, if anyone had ever succeeded at preventing me from "playing with electricity" when I was younger.

So I felt sort of conflicted and just kind of trailed off.  I don't think the kid learned much from that.

Note to Self

New beers are delivered to Wunderbar on Thursday nights, which means they need to clear out the fridge.  This is a task with which I am very much willing to help.  (I had a couple of Trois Pistoles on the way home from work tonight.  If I did that every night...  I'd be an alcoholic.)

TASTING: Miraculous Jewbelation

I recently picked up one of the Vertical Jewbelation packs from HE'BREW (Shmaltz Brewing Company) at my preferred local liquor store.  It contains Jewbelations 8-14, as well as a bottle of Vertical Jewbelation, a mixture of all of them to date aged in a Rye barrel, an empty "Shamash" bottle, a package of Chanukah candles, and a very attractive beer glass to drink from.  Jewbelation is of course their annual special brew; on the eighth anniversary of the brewery, they brewed the beer I'm drinking tonight with eight malts, eight varieties of hops, and 8% ABV.  Every year, they brew a new recipe and those numbers go up by one (how long can they keep it up?).

Most of these I'm going to sit on and "cellar" for a while, but I just had to break out ONE of them, so I cracked open a bottle of the Miraculous Jewbelation (#8, the first) this evening.  It's delicious!

"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."

APPEARANCE: Very dark but not opaque; it's actually a very dark amber on the edges if you hold it up to the light.  Good initial head that, as you might expect from a higher ABV beer, doesn't last, soon reducing to a ring around the edge, but it leaves a pleasing layer of bubbles down the sides of the glass as you drink.

AROMA: Eight kinds of hops in one beer is very unusual, and you can definitely sense it in the nose.  It isn't overpowering at all, very well balanced, but very complex.  I'm thinking there was an emphasis on German hops, but I'm not sure.

TASTE AND MOUTHFEEL: So, so good.  Hop bitterness is prominent but extremely smooth (the years of aging may have something to do with that, of course).  Despite being a dark beer with a serious grain bill, it's not really roasty or burnt at all, rather rich and subtly caramel-y.  It's really just sweet enough to balance the hops, though, and the body stays pretty light without being thin.  The carbonation is perfect, leaving the beer only slowly as you drink it and seemingly helping to distribute each sip to every part of your mouth and carry some more of that hop aroma to your nose.

FUN FACTS: "8 is a miraculous number in Jewish life," the label informs you, providing many examples, such as:

• Chanukah, Passover, and Sukkot span 8 days,
• Solomon completed the First Temple in the 8th month of the 8th year,
• "Seinfeld" ran for 8 seasons,

among others.

There aren't many of these packs around, but if you have the chance to pick one up, you'd better do it.

Operation: Stand Up

The operation has begun.  Reconnaissance began tonight and was highly successful.  It appears the initial assault will require about five minutes worth of material, with an emphasis on the filthiest stuff the lab boys can cook up.  Resistance is expected but it should be slight; we will be greeted as liberators.

In other news, it's looking like at least some of the soundtrack for Dr. Zombie-Hands is not going to be available, at least in its original form. Apparently the film is more lost than I thought despite being less than forty years old. I'm still going to do the best I can, though - I may simply have to substitute modern covers or closest equivalents for some tracks.

The Difference

If it had been him, it would have gone differently.

Two attractive young women on the bus needed help figuring out the local train system on their way to a convention centre.  That system consists of only one train, but the pair of gap-toothed old drunks who were trying to give them directions made it sound more confusing than the London Underground with all the signs rewritten in Cyrillic.  It wasn't that they were giving bad directions - they were just in that stage of drunkenness where you're still coherent but think you're not, so they kept giving the same directions, over and over, slightly rephrased.  Each repetition made the out-of-town ladies look a little more lost.

You can't interrupt them, either, because that will only make it worse, so you have to wait for the ladies to get off the bus to tell them you're going the same way they are.  The girls are dressed very nicely, but not for business - not the skirts or suits I'd expect going to Rexall Place, more like slightly-more-respectable clubbing outfits (but no less revealing), stylish makeup and hair, and the very definition of fierce heels.  They're friendly and bubbly and very grateful for simple directions they can understand.

I can hear in my head the story he'd tell me next week, if it had been him.  They would have been high-priced call girls on their way to a convention of small arms dealers.  They would have been working for a corporate espionage firm as part of a complicated scheme to blackmail a middle manager into stealing some files.  He would have scored them some blow and in exchange, received a black business card with red printing - no name, just a picture of a spider and a phone number in Amsterdam.

But it was me, so they were just two nice girls in a strange town who needed directions.  I told them to get off at Coliseum, and follow the signs; I wasn't going that far.

Post Script, 3:00AM: I relayed all this to him, and he laughed, and then he pointed out that Rexall Place isn't a convention center, and the girls were obviously here to see Lady Gaga.  Kind of ruined it for me a little, not least because, dammit...  I could totally have scored with the brunette if I was thinking about what I was doing instead of what he would have done.  There's a lesson here, I'm sure.

Oh, Alberta. What the hell is wrong with you?

Somebody told me this e-mail I sent out was a blog post, and as it's already written, here you go.

Since moving to Alberta, I've been weirded-out by different things.  People speaking English on the bus.  People yelling, "Get a haircut!" without intending it to be ironic.  Straight men wearing cowboy hats.  Some of these things I have mentioned here before.  You can get used to just about anything over time, of course, but every once in a while something still catches you off guard.


So I went out for a late-ish breakfast on Saturday, at Friends & Neighbors, and as is my wont on such occasions I brought along the big biography of Graham Greene I've been reading in bits and pieces since I moved here.  Very thick book, black and white photo of Greene on the cover.  Filled with stuff about Greene completing his first novel and working as a war correspondent and a spy before he was twenty, writing a set amount every day - basically I read it to make myself feel inadequate.

Anyway, as I was paying at the cash, I laid the book down on the counter next to me, and while I was entering the tip (not much, the new waiter got my order wrong at first), a fellow came up behind me and slurred, "That's a cheeky book."

Yeah, I didn't know what to think.

I glanced back at him, a fellow about my height, a little unsteadier than I think one ought to be at that hour of the morning, buzz-cut, red neck.  He continued: "That looks like a really intellect-yual book.  Can't you be an intellect-yual where you come from?"

"Where I come from?"

"Don't you practice...  I mean, you're a muslim?"

My first instinct was of course to call him an ignorant troglodyte and see if he knew what that meant, but we were in a crowded restaurant after all. Avoid confrontation.  Okay.

"No..."

"But didn't you used to be a muslim?"

"What?  No.  Why?"

"But you're from the Midder East, like."

"No, I'm not."

"But you're a muslim.  That's what it usually, a beard that shape usually
means."

A beard that shape?  My beard is beard-shaped, surely.  Fair enough, though, I guess facial hair can mean things, like how having a seventies mustache means you're a skeevy douche.

"It pretty much just grows like that."

"But you do, do you identify with the muslim faith?"

"No."

"But I mean, you identify with the Middle, the Ar...  Terrorists?"

"What?  No.  What are you talking about?"

This has to be the longest it has ever taken anyone to pay for breakfast. Move it along, I want to get out of here!

"You know this guy, Muh-Am-Ar-Uh-Muh-Ar...  You know we paid him ten million dollars, how do you feel about that?"

"I don't know anything about it."

"There are Native kids who got sod...  Who got...  Who got done in the butt, and we only gave them a few thousand, dollars, but this Muh...  Ar-Muh-Am... Uh-Am-Ari, he came and he played our intelligence agencies against each, I mean he played our intelligence against, our intelligence agents, intelligence agencies against the govern...  I mean, he turned our government against our intelligence, and made them give him fif, ten and a half million dollars and a mansion in (unintelligable)..."

I think he's talking about that guy who got sent to a secret prision and tortured.  Who wasn't actually a terrorist, or involved with terrorism, at all.  I really don't know much about it, but it seems like he pretty much deserves whatever he can get out of the government, really.  Anyway, my new friend continued...

"I think that's a problem, isn't it?  Like, it's a sign, our societ...  Our country is getting too liberal, when that happens, right?  Like when my father built this country, as a nucular physicist..."

I am not making any of this up.

"... He wouldn't...  I mean, don't you think, do you agree with that?"

"As I said, I really don't know anything about it."

I finally managed to retrieve my bank card and extricate myself from between him and the counter, but from the way his eyes followed me, I could tell I had failed his test.  I had not managed to convince him that I wasn't a terrorist.  Who could blame him for his suspicions though.  After all, not only did I have a beard, but I had been reading a book.  A thick book that didn't appear to be about wizards or farm equipment.  Speaking of which, as I threaded my way out, he had a parting shot.

"That's a real good book, eh?"

Yeah...  I didn't move here for the culture.

On Wanting for Nothing

I wouldn't call my life perfect, or complete, or necessarily satisfactory. I have a one room apartment with one chair, a desk to write at, a thin futon on the floor to sleep on, a set of shelves for my books. I have two pans, one pot, and a cookie sheet to cook with, and three knives (which is actually a bit of a luxury). I have a bottle of whisky I could stand to replace soon. I have some nice red curtains I need to get around to hemming.

I would call my life pretty simple. I don't have a television, or a stereo system. I don't have a lot of appointments or activities. I don't have a vacuum cleaner, or a carpet shampooing machine.

A lot of people do have carpet cleaning machines, though. It's kind of amazing to me. I repair said machines, so they get brought in to me when they stop working, which seems to be often, and almost invariably because they were not properly used or maintained. People often want them back in a hurry, too, seeming to expect while-you-wait service. I can't help but think that people do not need to own their own carpet cleaning machines. They need less carpet, fewer floors. These people have too much, not in the sense that they are depriving others or it is somehow unfair, but in the sense that what they have is literally more trouble for them than it can possibly be worth.

When I say I want for nothing, I don't mean that I don't want anything. I want a bigger pot so I can make long pasta. I want a better copy of the Ring Cycle. I want a low table with cushions around it to sit on if I ever have guests. I want to hammer the short story I'm working on into something resembling what I originally meant it to be.

Most of all, though, I want nothing. I want more nothing in my life, not even a vast expanse of emptiness, but just a general absence of all the hideous clutter everyone surrounds themselves with. My one room, quiet and spartan.

Or at least fewer damn carpet cleaners full of soap. You have to use the rinse setting, people, it's not rocket science.

There can only be ONE!

Wireless operates on the same basic principles as the Quickening, right?

So my MacBook, DEUS, usually so reliable, spontaneously and without any warning or apparent cause loses the ability to access the Internet. It can connect to wireless networks just fine, it'll connect to your cell phone from across the world, but it can't actually do anything with the connection. This is bothersome, as I am in the process of moving and for various reasons in this Modern Age that requires me to have Internet access.

So I dig out the old Toshiba, Wintermute, the venerable, battle-scarred, and frankly broken refurbished Toshiba I bought back in university and used more or less to death. It won't read most kinds of removable media anymore, it has trouble with the USB ports, the screen isn't great, the battery holds zero charge, it issues random exciting error messages you will never ever discover the cause or meaning of, and on and on, but its cheap generic wireless card still works. So I can haul it, my MacBook, and their respective power adapters down to the Internet cafe to look at tech support forums and figure out why DEUS abandoned me in my hour of need.

So I log on here, eating some kind of disgusting whipped-sugar pie and drinking the wateriest latté I have ever, I hesitate to say tasted, but had anyway. I begin digging into the forums, and find a very promising-sounding, though apparently borderline unsolvable, problem which sounds just like mine, but turns out not to be what I have at all. So I start looking for something else... And the café wireless dies.

I convince the shiftless sandwich jockey to reset the router, and find that Wintermute can now no longer connect to the wireless at all... But at the exact same instant, DEUS has Internet access again.

So apparently the problem is that only one laptop can have any given function at a time, and I just needed to sacrifice Wintermute's 'Net access so that DEUS could be resurrected. Now if only I could find a way to sacrifice Wintermute's larger screen...