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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
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Complex Numbers A complex number is expressed in the standard form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers and i is defined by i^2 = -1 (that is, i is the square root of -1). For example, 3 + 2i is a complex number. The bi term is often referred to as an imaginary number (though this may be misleading, as it is no more "imaginary" than the symbolic abstractions we know as the "real" numbers). Thus, every complex number has a real part, a, and an imaginary part, bi. Complex numbers are often represented on a graph known as the "complex plane," where the horizontal axis represents the infinity of real numbers, and the vertical axis represents the infinity of imaginary numbers. Thus, each complex number has a unique representation on the complex plane: some closer to real; others, more imaginary. If a = b, the number is equal parts real and imaginary. Very simple transformations applied to numbers in the complex plane can lead to fractal structures of enormous intricacy and astonishing beauty. ![Merit Badge in Quill Award
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Congratulations on winning an honorable mention for Best Blog at the 2018 Quill Awards for [Link To Item #1196512] . *^*Smile*^* This award was sponsored by the blogging consortium including [Link To Item #30dbc] , [Link To Item #blogcity] , [Link To Item #bcof] and [Link To Item #1953629] . For more details, see [Link To Item #quills] .](https://images.Writing.Com/imgs/writing.com/writers/badges/type-Blogging-2180.gif) ![Merit Badge in Highly Recommended
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| After a bunch of wine celebrations, finally, a day about a beer. Gose, pronounced GOZE-uh, is a tart wheat beer of German provenance. It disappeared for a while, from what I've heard. Died out, ceased production, joined the choir invisible. Didn't get resurrected until people started drinking real beer again. This German sour beer is customarily made with coriander, which gives it notes of flowers and citrus, and with salt, so it is usually quite salty. "But what about the well-known German beer purity laws?" Gose was an exception, and besides, one needs to be very, very careful when promoting anything that has the words "German" and "purity" in it. Lactic acid is often added, which makes it even sourer. This is not nearly as disgusting as it sounds. Gose may not be my favorite style, by far, but it's not like it's fermented goat's milk or anything. But the popularity of gose and International Happy Gose Day is not limited to Leipzig or even to Germany. The beer has been gaining in popularity in the United States in recent years. Sour beers in general (there are other styles besides gose) have taken off. I suspect it's at least partly a backlash to years of bitter, overhopped IPAs, which themselves became popular in a backlash to mass-produced, flavorless, rice-adjunct lagers. Americans, it seems, don't seem to believe in middle ground. Gotta take everything to an extreme. I remember the first time I went to a brewery that specialized in sours. They offered a sampling of their entire tap list, 12 beers arranged in 3-ounce tasters on a platter, like a clock face. When I was done, the tap lady asked me what I thought. I was just drunk enough to tell the truth: "Sorry, I like my beer to taste different going down than it does coming back up." Harsh? Sure. But that's how I felt about sour beers at the time. Since then, I've found some that I actually like, including a gose here and there. My favorite local brewery, for example, makes a good fruited one. I don't know why they call today International Happy Gose Day. It's not even a pun. If it were Happy Gose Lucky Day, sure, I could get behind that. Or Day Gose By. Or Gose Fishing. Okay, I'll stop now. And the article speaks of toasting with "Goseanna!" which I've never heard of before, and so I'm going to assume they're trolling until I get confirmation of that. |
Once again prompted by "Invalid Item"  , I present yet another wine-related celebration, one that I look forward to every year.Unlike some of the other observances I've noted, which are international or US in nature, this one's French. Or, at least, it's French the way Oktoberfest is Bavarian: no one's stopping us ugly Americans from celebrating. There's a bit about Beaujolais Nouveau at the link above, but, naturally, I'm going to say my piece (actually pieces) about this utterly delightful wine. The "Nouveau" part of the name means, it doesn't take four years of Duolingo French lessons to know, "new." But it's not like it's a new product; no, I think it's "new" in the sense of "fresh." The "Beaujolais" part is a place name, like Bordeaux or Champagne. Apparently, according to that link, the capital of the region is Beaujeu, which might translate to "beautiful game," which honestly would be really cool if so. But I digress. This is a "new" wine, meaning the time from harvest, through fermentation, to the important part (drinking it) is very short. This results in a clean, crisp, fruity wine, without many of the more complex flavors or profound textures of the slower reds. It is also, unusually for a red wine, best served chilled, like a white. Another digression: it's well-known, even outside of wine circles, that most reds aren't served chilled. But this does not mean they should be served at room temperature (around 20C). Same goes for many dark beers. No, these heavier fermented beverages are at their best at cellar temperature, which is around 13C, though there's some leeway there. Owing to its status as a young wine, Beaujolais Nouveau is, instead, served cold like a white, or that better-known French product, champagne. As delicious as the wine is on its own, there's a special, serendipitous connection for those of us in the US: Beaujolais Nouveau Day is, as is also noted at the link, celebrated on the third Thursday of November. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it's because Thanksgiving is celebrated over here on the fourth Thursday. And yes, Beaujolais Nouveau is, normally, available in the US. Today is the day I usually make a pilgrimage to the grocery store (as opposed to ordering a delivery therefrom) to pick out a bottle. Might have to be tomorrow, though; I have a beer dinner to attend tonight and I need to make sure I'm well-rested for that. And I can tell you this from experience: there is, quite simply, no better wine to accompany a traditional Thanksgiving feast. Like I said, it's not a complicated wine. But usually, one of the distinctive fruity flavors it fronts is that of cranberry. And what better accompaniment for turkey than cranberry? So there's that linking the two countries, as if the Statue of Liberty, the design of our capital city, and, you know, the entire concept of representative democracy weren't enough. "But, Waltz, the Pilgrims didn't have French wine to drink." Okay, fair. And Beaujolais Nouveau hadn't even been invented yet, not to mention the refrigeration that would keep it at its ideal temperature. But if you think your Thanksgiving feast is a perfect reconstruction of what the Pilgrims ate, or, more appropriately, what the settlers at Jamestown managed to scrounge up, think again. I don't know; maybe you try to do that, keeping it all to truly native American harvest foods. If so, great. You do your thing. As for me, while I have no intention or desire to be part of a crowd at Thanksgiving, I may give the holiday a nod by warming up a frozen turkey pot pie. It will be accompanied by a nice, cold bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau. |
| Once more inspired by "Invalid Item" , today marks another wine celebration. When I discussed various reds last week, I failed to mention Zinfandel. There are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of grape varieties out there, and I don't even know all of them, but Zinfandel is kind of a biggie, not something relatively obscure like Mourvedre (one of my favorites). Zinfandel is a bit of an outlier because it came to the US by way of Austria, though the wine is of Italian origin, and the name is... Croatian? Something like that. Actual zinfandel is bold, deep, unsubtle, and so red it's nearly black. The grapes themselves are extraordinarily dark-skinned. But then they had to go and make White Zinfandel, which is emblematic of everything that's wrong in the world. Now, to be somewhat fair, I've heard it's improved since the last time I had the misfortune of sipping it. But I'm still avoiding it on general principles. "White" wine is, of course, not actually white, any more than my skin color is. It can range from pale, almost clear, to a brilliant off-yellow color. The first offense of white zinfandel is that it's actually a blush, or rosé. I'm not expert enough to know much about the processes involved, but from what I understand, the pale pink color in most rosé wine comes from only brief contact with the darker skins of a grape that's generally pale inside. The second offense is that it's inoffensive. It's the wine equivalent of white bread, American cheese, and light beer: something seemingly crafted to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and I'm not low nor common nor a denominator. And finally, the wine I tried when it was all the rage in the States was cloyingly sweet. (As I noted above, that may no longer be the case.) I'm not a hater of sweet wines in general; my first wine was, it should come as no surprise, Manischewitz, a fortified wine; I'm a fan of port and its non-Portuguese imitators; and I'll drink the hell out of icewine. Sweet wines have their place. This one just seemed tailor-made to be a wine for people who don't like wine. "But, Waltz, doesn't that make it a gateway wine?" Maybe. But it's not like there aren't other fine fermented and/or distilled beverages if you're just looking for something alcoholic, and if you don't like wine, then you don't like it, and that's okay. I know people who simply don't like the taste. WZ seems like it's meant to help non-wine people fit in to the rarefied snobbery of wine culture. In that, it fails, because real wine snobs look down their well-trained noses at WZ quaffers, much as I look down my nose at Bud Light aficionados. It's like they're trying to appeal to a broader market by making a product that's nothing like other instances of that product. Naked cash grab. Finally, "white" zinfandel tastes completely unlike the red variety, such that when I finally got around to tasting actual zinfandel, it was a real epiphany. I might actually like it better than Shiraz. There was a bumper sticker floating around some time ago: "Absolve yourself of white zin." Indeed. That said, if you like it, then you like it. Apparently lots of people do, or at least claim to; it still sells. I'm not actually ragging on your sense of taste, only how the winemakers addressed it. |
| A couple of weeks ago, in "Hunter's Moon" , I wrote: "I have another article in the queue that addresses the 'green cheese' cliché. Maybe it'll turn up on the next full moon (which will be the Beaver Moon). But probably not." Indeed, yesterday was a New Moon, precisely as far as we can get from a Full Moon, so we may not even get to gaze upon the satellite this evening; it's still quite close to the sun, from our perspective, and will set before the end of astronomical twilight. If you're lucky, maybe you'll be able to make out a thin crescent just after sunset. But today's article, from Mental Floss, takes a look at the moon anyway. Why Do People Say the Moon is Made of Cheese? The moon-cheese nexus may have started with a fable about a hungry wolf and a crafty fox. Everybody knows that Earth’s moon does not, in fact, consist of dairy products. Considering the astounding number of people who insist that the Earth is flat (that is, a nonzero number of people), I would never say "everybody" in this context. So where did the myth that the moon is made of cheese come from? I'm just as interested in folklore as I am in science, and regular readers know I'm a sucker for origin stories. Though the idea that the moon is made of cheese has been around for millennia, it’s doubtful that anyone ever actually believed it, at least not academically. Academics also knew the Earth wasn't flat. That doesn't mean your average farmer, or whatever, didn't believe it. To be fair to those farmers, it's not like it mattered in terms of doing agriculture. The earliest record of this bizarre notion comes from a medieval Slavic fable in which a ravenous wolf chases a seemingly hapless fox, hoping to score an easy meal. Never. Trust. The. Fox. But the best-known early citation dates to 1546, and can be found in The Proverbs of John Heywood. The document is a compendium of some of the author’s most famous sayings, such as “the more, the merrier,” “a penny for your thoughts,” and “Rome was not built in a day.” At one point, he jokingly states “the moon is made of greene cheese” (“greene” refers to the food’s age rather than its color).At last, a time frame for the "a penny for your thoughts" proverb! People nowadays still use that, but they generally offer two pennies (which I suspect is related to "my two cents' worth" because in the US, "cent" and "penny" are interchangeable) "because of inflation." But what would inflation actually do to the value of a 1546 penny? According to this handy website, one pence in 1550 (they only do 0-ending years) would be roughly equivalent to one pound fourteen in 2017, apparently the latest year they have British financial data for. Also from that website, one pence wouldn't have purchased a single horse, sheep, cow, measure of wheat, or a day's wages, but apparently it could buy a thought.So, because I'm not British, how much was £1.14 equivalent to in USD 2017? There's a website for that, too: the conversion factor is, on average, 0.808 pounds to the dollar (currency conversions fluctuate almost daily; I believe this is the average used by the US for the purposes of taxing an American's income from the UK). So x/£1.14 = $1/£0.808 yields x=$1.41.Finally, as you might have heard, inflation has run unusually high these past few years, so we now must convert 2017 USD to 2023 USD. Is there a website for that? Of course there is. From it, we find that number to be about $1.76, using the numbers from October of both years because the November 2023 numbers aren't out yet.These, are, necessarily, very rough estimates, especially when it comes to the purchasing power of a British pound in a pre-industrial society. And I won't guarantee that I did the math right, because it's too early in the morning. But according to this, today, saying "$1.76 for your thoughts" would buy roughly the same amount of thought (If you need that in 2023 UK pounds, that's on you). But one wonders if thoughts are really that valuable nowadays; maybe I'll just keep saying "a penny." Wow, do I digress. Back to the "greene cheese" article: The scientific community has never supported the claim, yet every children’s program from Tom and Jerry to Wallace and Gromit has made its fair share of moon-cheese references. Well, duh. It's still a fun piece of folklore, and thus great joke fodder. Even NASA couldn’t resist getting in on the joke. On April Fool’s Day 2002, the agency claimed to have “proven” once and for all that the moon was made of cheese by releasing a Photoshopped image with an expiration date printed on one of the moon’s craters. Casein point. |
| Every once in a while, I run across something I didn't know about. Weird, huh? That I don't know something? Well, now I do. I'd never heard of the culture, let alone the food. Obviously, I've never tried it. Honestly, Atlas Obscura, here, could have made this whole thing up, April Fools style, and the joke would have been lost on me. Naturally, I checked out the Wikipedia page, with the understanding that those can be a spoof too. But nope... just an entire culture I'd never even heard of.Jiu hoo char is a specialty of the Peranakans, a cultural group that stretches across Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. While not Peranakan herself, my mother inherited her jiu hoo char recipe from my grandmother, who inherited it from my great-grandmother, who in turn learned it from her neighbor, herself a nyonya—a Malay and Indonesian honorific for married women of the Peranakan culture. Somehow I doubt that these recipes translate well into Western standard cookbook recipes. But I don't know; maybe someone's tried. As recently as a decade ago, there were fears that Peranakan cuisine might die out, due to the tradition of recipes passing only from mother to daughter. Based on what I saw on the Wiki page, it's not just the cuisine but the culture itself that seems to be hovering on the edge of decline. Just off New York City’s Union Square, Kebaya is the first restaurant in the city to focus on Peranakan food. If there was going to be one anywhere in the US, I'd guess New York or Los Angeles. I visit New York fairly often; this is something I'd like to try. Peranakan culture dates back to the 15th century. Derived from the Malay word anak, meaning child, Peranakan refers to the descendants of the Chinese seafaring traders who landed in Southeast Asia and married local Malay women. Today, pockets of Peranakan culture are scattered across Indonesia, Singapore, and the Malaysian states of Penang and Malacca. I don't know enough to tell whether there's bigotry involved. We in the US don't have a monopoly on racism. A key hallmark is how much care goes into each dish’s preparation. Take kuih pai tee, for example, a petite vegetable-and-spice filled pastry. Making the tart shells requires dipping a mold into a thin batter, and then dipping it into a hot vat of oil and removing it at just the right moment. Remove it too soon, and the shell crumples; leave it in too long, and it burns. Yeah, that's a lot of finicky work. Below are some of the unique building blocks that make up Peranakan food. I won't go into this part. For once, though, I'm not put off by the graduate thesis food bloggers always write before getting to the practical part. I'm a little bit less ignorant than I was before I read the article, and that's a good thing. |
| Another Sunday, another exhumation from the archives... though this one isn't buried that deeply; it's from early March of last year, featuring an article from six months prior: "Real Men Don't Worry About What a Real Man Is" The link is from Cracked, so it's still around as of today. I can't speak for how timely it still is; if you do the math above, you'll note that the article was from over two years ago, and things were... well, they were a little different in 2021. I don't follow trends closely enough to know if there's still a burgeoning "reclaim your manliness" industry, for instance.As I've noted, one of the reasons I do these, apart from my blog rapidly running out of space and I'm trying to start to bring some sense of closure to it, is to see how my perspective or opinions might have changed in the intervening year or years (anything from before 12 months ago is fair game for these randomly-selected entries). But having re-read the entry, and the article, I'm not finding any notable evolution in my ideas on the subject. I will highlight a few things, though: Me: ...my body wash, which is also a shampoo, conditioner, salad dressing, cake icing, and engine lube. I was quite proud of this line, and even received a positive comment about it. Hopefully, it's clear that it was a joke, but the reality is that my hair product is a) marketed to men and b) a "3-in-1 shampoo, conditioner, and body wash." Recently, it occurred to me that the cultural assumption still holds in the US that men have short hair, and that, more than sociological or biological factors, or even marketing, may be behind the labeling—though I imagine that it's attractive to many heterosexual men to have just one all-encompassing product to use, if only because their partners have taken up all the room in the shower caddy with their own various products. Though I don't have that problem, I still appreciate its versatility and simplicity. Problem is, though, I haven't gotten a haircut since before the pandemic, and my mane was already fairly well-developed when all the barbershops and hairdressers temporarily shut down. At this point, it's pretty much full-on The Dude. While I'm glad I still have most of it at my age, I wondered (you know, one of those epiphanies you sometimes get in the shower) if I shouldn't look for something more designed for 80s-rock-star hair. But, you know, being men, long-haired hippie freaks and rock stars don't generally talk openly about hair care. So here I am, talking openly about hair care. Because, as you might guess from the earlier entry's title, I don't worry about what a "real man" is. Whatever; I'll keep using my all-in-one until it no longer works for me. Another comment wondered why I didn't expand more on the final point made in the original article. I can't speak for my attitude at the time, any more than I can remember what I had for lunch that day, but upon re-reading that part of the article, I find I simply don't have much to add. I don't know what goes on in other men's heads any more than I know what my cat is thinking. The header includes the phrase: "Men Are Now Lonely, Isolated, And Scared" Even if I agree, which I'm inclined to do, I don't have answers. Personally, I'm not lonely, even when I'm alone; I don't feel isolated, because I have friends; and apart from the occasional jump-shock from an unexpected indoor spider (they get relocated outdoors) or when I had to face eye surgery (which I came out of just fine), I don't live my life in fear. If there's anything I could work up a comment on, it's this bit from the article: If we insist on idealizing the '50s, maybe we should focus on the part where masculinity meant contributing to your community. That’s the real difference between men today and back then. Guessing here that by "your community" they mean your physical location. Most of us have communities online, and they could be comprised of people from all over the world. For a time, as an example, I was gaming with a group that included someone remoting in from India, which is almost as far away as it's possible to get and still be on the same planet. And then there's this site, of course. But in terms of local community, I don't have much of a presence. Yesterday, I made a brief and rare foray into the wild in order to attend a book discussion and signing by three of my favorite authors, all of whom live nearby—but I would never have known about their work if I hadn't found them online first. Many years ago, I participated in a fantasy & science fiction book club, in person. Perhaps I need to find one of those again. Maybe find some decent shampoo, first. |
| Courtesy of Cracked, today we show how something built for laziness can get even lazier. I'm not knocking lazy, mind you. I'm all for convenience and instant gratification. They're two of the very few upsides of living in a declining civilization. These examples, however, are laziness on the part of the producers. If you’re a snack company, what better way to rile up the populace than to reveal some sort of never-before-seen orientation of a preferred snack food. You'd think they'd end up competing with themselves like that. Sure, you’ve had Reese’s peanut cups for your whole life, but now that they’re shaped, in the vaguest possible way, like a pumpkin, they must be simply irresistible. Nothing about Reese's cups is irresistible to me. I know this is blasphemy, as they're consistently at the #1 spot of favorite candies, but I don't particularly like them. Maybe if the chocolate were real, and the peanut butter wasn't dry and crumbly, I'd feel differently, but then they'd be expensive and no one else would buy them. Oreos, now... I've been suckered into new Oreos fillings. Until they produced one that was ambrosia itself, and then discontinued them, at which point they (mostly) lost me as a consumer. 5. Oops! All Berries I'll admit it: I ate Cap'n Crunch as a kid. It's legitimately the first breakfast cereal I have a memory of consuming. As I was very young, most of it probably ended up on the floor; I don't remember that part, though. And I ate the hell out of its variant with the "berries," but I don't recall craving just the "berries." This actual product debuted way too late for me to have found out for myself. I see through you with the ease of un-stained glass. You smelled blood in the water to the tune of sugar-addicted children for whom even the already heavily sugared default Crunch Particles no longer fed their fix. You get to debut a brand-new cereal, and the advertising push that goes along with it, without actually having to invent anything new. You’re just capitalizing on the human fascination of any new offering, and at the same time, hoping we don’t realize this is just a way for you to save on electricity and maintenance costs by giving the robot that combines the Captain Crunch and the Berries one day off a week. And I don't believe for a second that the company cares about robots' rights. 4. Buncha Crunch As far as I know, this candy is, despite the name, completely unrelated to Cap'n Crunch cereal... except for, possibly, the sugar content. When Crunch bars debuted, they chose an unwieldy shape and presentation. A chocolate bar thin enough to be practically allergic to shipping, even before its base architecture was destroyed by a network of weak points in the form of puffed rice. Worse, it's made by Nestle, which is the Platonic ideal of "evil corporation." Merely spray chocolate wantonly over a conveyor belt of loose crunch and package them. Then throw them into a cardboard box that they couldn’t be bothered to toss an internal bag into. Here, I think the author's giving Nestle too much credit. Seems to me they're just packaging their robots' mistakes. Also, still not real chocolate. 3. Corn-Flavored Doritos Don’t act like some janitor at the Frito-Lay factory accidentally left corn in a toaster and now we’re being treated to a New World of Flavor. Do they truly think we’re no smarter than apes? As the article notes, these are just tortilla chips, only unhealthier. Want corn chips? Get a hold of Fritos, one of that company's supposed flagship products. Their ingredients list is blissfully short, too: corn, corn oil, and salt. I don't believe in the mantra "if you can't pronounce it, don't eat it," because that encourages ignorance, but having four words of one syllable each can be appealing. 2 Crystal Pepsi Not sure how this belongs on this list, but to me it's like: "How can we make a Pepsi that's even worse than Pepsi, without making a 'diet' version?" 1. Single-Stuf Oreo Yes, I mentioned Oreos already, but this is a different issue. Obviously, the original Oreo is the complete opposite of innovation. Moreso because they ripped off the original creme-sandwich cookie, Hydrox. Where my objection lies is in the fact that we cannot let them die the death they should have when their superior successor, the Double Stuf, took the throne. No. The Double Stuf is too much. The "creme" is not the best part of the Oreo. I don’t care what you do with the old ones, market them Diet Oreos for all I care. Which I’m just cynical enough to think would absolutely work. Stop giving Nabisco ideas. They have enough terrible ones already. |
| This one's from Atlas Obscura, and will surely put to rest the pervasive rumors about secret government alien conspiracies. Area 51, Aliens, and the Truth (It’s Out There) A national security historian explains what’s really going on at the infamous Nevada site. Ah... but that's what they want you to think. One of the reasons people can never be entirely sure about what is going on at Area 51 is that it is a highly classified secret military facility. Someone is entirely sure about what's going on. They're not talking. It was not until 2013 that the United States government even acknowledged the existence and name “Area 51.” After which they heaved a great sigh and opened Area 52, because Area 51 wasn't secret enough anymore. As a national security historian, I know there’s a long history of secrets at Area 51. I also know that none of those secrets have anything to do with space aliens. Or is the author lying? The base commonly referred to as Area 51 is located in a remote area of southern Nevada, roughly 100 miles (161 kilometers) from Las Vegas. It's also immediately adjacent to where they did underground and open-air nuclear bomb tests. Perhaps the aliens require a higher level of ionizing radiation to survive. Area 51 was selected in 1955 to test the U-2 in part because its remote location could help keep the plane secret. Where the streets have no name... Area 51 became the test site for other secret new aircraft. This included the A-12, which, like the U-2, was a fast-flying reconnaissance plane. The A-12 was first test flown at Homey Airport in 1962. It had a bulging disc-like center to carry additional fuel. Its shape and shiny titanium body could well have been responsible for some people’s reports about seeing spherical ships, also known as flying saucers. Why? Were they made out of swamp gas? When the government does not tell the public the full truth, no matter the reasons, secrets can lead to wild speculation. Secrecy can leave room for conspiracy theories to develop. And when the government does tell the truth, conspiracy theorists assume it's lying. In fact, many UFO sightings match almost exactly with dates and times of flights of then-classified experimental aircraft. We also know that prototype drones and more recent versions have been tested at the site. "Many." So... even if you're telling the truth, others are still aliens? In the end, there is no reason to think that anything other than earthly technologies have been behind the strange sights and sounds at Area 51. Ah... but that's what they want you to think. Okay, seriously (everything I wrote above should be taken with a grain of iodized salt), the government needs to test their super-secret spy technologies somewhere. The only place in the US more remote than the middle of freakin' Nevada would be in Alaska, and that presents logistical challenges, such as either sending stuff across Canada or over the ocean, not to mention it's cold. Though I'd wager there's secret shit going on in that state, too. There's secret shit going on in a lot of places, including a site not far from where I live. One day, it'll all come out in the open... and then certain people still won't believe it. |
| Hot on the heels of "International Merlot Day" and "Harvey Wallbanger Day" , it seems that today is... Don't look at me; I don't make these things up. Apparently, it's set for the second Thursday in November every year, which, sadly, means it can never fall on the same day as Merlot Day. I was looking forward to blending them. I wanted to highlight this observance for several reasons: 1) I like Tempranillo. It's usually a blending variety, but I'm pretty sure I've had pure Tempranillo and liked it; 2) In my discussion of wine regions the other day, I shamefully left out Spain, Portugal, and Italy, where this grape tends to thrive (I also left out Germany, which, with a few exceptions, really should stick to beer); 3) The promoter of International Tempranillo Day is named "Tempranillo Advocates Producers and Amigos Society (TAPAS)," and that made me laugh. Clearly, TAPAS is an American organization, because only English speakers would dare to create such a boldly horrible forced acronym, and the UK wouldn't want another war against Spain; Canada doesn't produce much Tempranillo, if any; and Australia and New Zealand are too classy to torture language like that.As for the grape itself, obviously, it's associated with Spain in the way that Merlot and others are associated with France, but it's a very popular variety, so it's been transplanted to other places, like California. I suspect, though, that more people have heard of Merlot. That's partly because, as I noted up there, it's often used in blends; and partly because France likes to think that good wine can only come from their side of the Pyrenees (and their side of the Alps), and they have a better marketing cartel. The name, incidentally, refers to it ripening earlier than other grapes (same Latin root as other "time" words like tempo, tempus, temporary, temporal, and tempura). I imagine this is a desirable quality for winemakers, as it means their harvest and production periods (and thus, output) can be extended, if they have other vines planted as well. As for the wine itself, it's been a while since I've had any, so I couldn't describe the taste even if I could bring myself to use oenophilic language like I did in the Merlot entry. I don't keep wine-tasting notes the way I do for beer, but I do remember that it's quite tasty, though probably not as bold as the common French varietals. It's also, as I understand it, a common grape used in port. Port can only be labeled "port" if it comes from Portugal, which, as I'm sure you can guess, has roughly the same wine-growing conditions as Spain, being on the same peninsula and all. I mean, I don't know what penalties they could impose if someone in California called their product "port;" war, I suppose. Trade, shooting, nuclear, or otherwise. This is analogous to how champagne has to come from Champagne, or tequila can only be called tequila if it comes from a small region of Mexico, outside of which it must be labeled mezcal or agave spirits or whatever. But the point here is that port can be made from many different grape varietals, and blends thereof, but the ubiquity of Tempranillo in the region means it's a popular one for the famous fortified wine. So there you have it. If you like red wine, give it a try next time you see it (doesn't have to be today); it may surprise you, and that surprise might even be pleasant. |
| Prompted by "Invalid Item" , another alcohol-positive observance... sort of. Believe it or not, there are drinks I haven't tried. This is one of them. According to the above link, a Harvey Wallbanger is made with "vodka, Galliano liqueur, and orange juice." Proportions aren't given, but I'm confident that a quick internet search, which I can't be arsed to do, would provide numerous recipes. Now, don't get me wrong: I appreciate cocktails or whatever else you want to call mixed drinks. One of the great joys of life is creating new ones, such as the Star Trek themed libations I've collected here: "Ten Forward" [18+] And I'd drink a wallbanger if it were available; it's just that as long as there are other options, some things just aren't on my radar, and this is one of them.To understand why that is, consider the most popular liquors, all of which are often used as the basis for cocktails: vodka, tequila, rum, gin, and whisk(e)y. Of those Big Five, vodka is, by far, the least interesting. Unless you get flavored vodka, it's generally neutral in character. The advantage of this is, clearly (pun intended), that it mixes well with other beverages. I don't hate it. I don't love it. It's just there to put alcohol into something that doesn't naturally contain it, such as, for example, orange juice. Sure, there's some variation in quality between different brands of vodka, but in general, it doesn't have much flavor of its own. This is good if you don't like the other available flavors, or if you're just trying to get drunk. I have a higher purpose in mind, which is to enjoy what I'm drinking while I'm drinking it. So, as I'm sure we all know, if you mix vodka and orange juice, you get a drink called a screwdriver in the US (In the UK, I think it's less creatively called "vodka and orange.") A quick search turned up the fun fact that this very simple cocktail wasn't really invented until WWII, which surprised me until I remembered I did an entry long ago about the origins of commercially produced orange juice, which I seem to recall weren't much earlier than that. I even bothered searching for that entry, and here it is, from last year: "Orange You Special" As with the subject of today's entry, the origin of the name is disputed. A Harvey Wallbanger, then, is basically a screwdriver with the addition of, specifically, Galliano, an Italian liqueur. And quoting from the headline link again: "The drink did not gain in popularity until the 1970's, when George Bednar of McKesson Imports Company promoted it, as a way to sell Galliano, which his company handled." Thus, it's just another marketing gimmick. So was orange juice, if you read my earlier entry. That's a good enough reason for me not to order one at a bar, and I have little desire to clutter my liquor cabinet with yet another flavored liqueur. Besides, why get one of those when there are so many cocktail options involving gin, rum, tequila, or whisk(e)y? |
| Inspired by "Invalid Item" , today is... I know I talk more about beer in here, but let's not forget, I'm a wine snob, too. There was a time, before craft beer started really taking off in the 90s, when I would always choose wine over beer, if only because the "beer" available was that rice-water swill from the Big Brands. One reason I don't write more about wine is that, while I enjoy it, I don't have the language for it. I don't mean French; I know some French (at least enough to know that Merlot is pronounced like mare-low and not murr-lott). I mean things like "this dry wine features delicate notes of plum and clover on the nose, and produces a deceptively tart tingle on the palate, where overtones of cherry and fig predominate; the lingering finish is subtly redolent of spices." I just can't. It's okay to say that you detect almost any fruit flavor in a wine... except grape. I imagine we can make an exception for wines made from other fruits. One definition of wine is fermented beverage made from fruit; in practice, this is usually grape, but can be any fruit. But in the case of most wines, made from grapes, "grape" is utterly off-limits in the tasting notes. So I won't describe the difference between Merlot and other red wines, except to say that it tastes almost completely unlike grape. The most widely-known reds include Merlot, Cabernet Sauvingon, Cabernet Franc, Syrah/Shiraz, and Malbec. They tend to get blended together a lot, too, which is an art in itself. There are, obviously, a bunch (pun intended) more, but those are ones I find at a lot of wineries, and many of them come from the internationally-famous Bordeaux region of France. But I've had better Merlot right here in the US. This is not to rag on France; I'm guessing that, like most grape-growing regions, they keep the really good stuff for themselves. One day, I'll find out for myself. Like California. I wasn't overly impressed by California wines until I actually went there and did wine tastings. I'm still not overly impressed with a lot of their beverages; as with beer, there's a rough inverse correlation between how big the producer is (i.e., how many liters they spit out in a year) and how objectively tasty their offerings are. It's not a perfect correlation; you also get real dogs from small vineyards. And Napa is severely overrated. Seriously. Napa is for tourists. Or, as the bumper sticker here in Virginia asserts: "Napa makes auto parts. Virginia makes wine." One big difference between wine and beer, apart from what agricultural product they're made from, is that, with very few exceptions, beer has a much narrower range of prices. You rarely, if ever, see a bottle of beer going for thousands of dollars. Not so with wine; I've seen bottles as high as $30,000—in Vegas, where they're obviously catering to jackpot winners and expense-account holders. They also use that as a decoy price; after seeing a $30K bottle, that $100 for a $20 bottle of Merlot seems almost reasonable. But Merlot is a very common grape, found in many regions that aren't France, as well as being, by some accounts anyway, the most widely-grown grape in its home country. Lots of winemakers in my area produce it. In other words, economically speaking, there's no shortage of supply. So there's no bloody excuse for paying more than around $20 for a bottle; anything more than that, you're just showing off. And I'll always pick it over Cabernet Sauvignon, but when it comes to reds, well, give me an Argentinian Malbec or an Australian Shiraz. |
| Today's article is long. There's a link to the podcast version on the site, if you're into that sort of thing; I'm not. The text is presumably a transcript of the podcast, or the script. It touches on topics I've covered here in the past, related to astronomy, so in contrast to the article, I'm keeping my commentary short. Journey to the Invisible Planet Long-Form/Podcast: The tangled history of humanity’s search for the solar system’s uncharted planets. I wrote about the potential Planet Nine back in August, and I've taken to calling it "Planet Ix" .What we have here is a comparatively brief (compared to the actual time frame involved) history of our discoveries about gravity and the solar system, starting with Newton. There's a discussion of Neptune—the first planet to be predicted by calculation prior to being telescopically observed. But then they tried the same trick on the orbital perturbations of Mercury, thinking that with the success of finding Neptune due to anomalies in (the seventh planet)'s orbit, they could discover a world orbiting between the sun and Mercury, which would throw off our numbering system. Mercury would become the second planet from the sun. Earth, fourth. The seventh planet whose name I will not type in an attempt to avoid juvenile puns, the eighth. Apart from its apparent influence on Mercury, the only evidence for another planet was a long history of spotty, unreplicated glimpses and blurry solar photos. It was the sea serpent of the solar system. Nevertheless, some manufacturers of solar system charts began including the intra-Mercurial body as a presumptive planet, and astrologers began to include Vulcan’s movements in their horoscopes. Said horoscopes would have been just as accurate as those without it, to be fair. In short, this proposed and popularly accepted planet, named Vulcan for its presumed temperature, didn't exist. Instead of modifying the other planets' numbers, we had to modify the theory of gravitation that otherwise worked so brilliantly. By "we," I mean "Einstein." The International Astronomical Union, a body responsible for naming celestial objects, continues to reserve the name “Vulcan,” just in case we do one day detect an invisible planet lurking in the heart of our solar system. You want to tell them, or should I? How this relates to the maybe-Planet Ix is that we're still finding anomalies, even with relativity taken into account, that point to the possibility of another large-ish planet out beyond Neptune. Besides Pluto. Besides Eris, which after all is probably about the size of Pluto and largely the impetus for demotion of that world to dwarf-planet status. If it does exist, it might have an orbit measured in thousands of years. Add that to your charts, astrologers. The article/podcast concludes with a broader discussion of the limitations of the revised gravitational theory. It is tempting to draw parallels between dark matter, dark energy, and planet Vulcan—all of them elusive, invisible influences plugging holes in accepted theories. I have, indeed, drawn such parallels in the past. After all, the universe isn’t obligated to agree with human intuition. Nor does it. |
| For anyone coming in new here, I like to highlight random past blog entries on Sundays. Why Sundays? Well, why not? I like to talk about how things, their context, my opinions, etc. have changed since I wrote the original entries. Today's comes from a very long time ago indeed: June 3, 2008. "60 More Years!" For context, as the entry notes, we here in the US were in the middle of the chaos of an election year.I don't talk about politics much in here. I used to mention it more, in that time period, but at least I wasn't overtly taking sides in that entry. Me: In other words, five more months of whose hair is better-groomed and which candidate's grandmother or great-grandmother was a flapper during the Roaring Twenties, because, of course, that makes a huge difference in who should be president. Turns out that my grandmother, who was around 30 years old at the time, was a flapper during the Roaring Twenties. I don't remember if I discovered this fun fact before or after I wrote that blog entry. But enough about politics. Let's take a closer look at one of those flyover states: South Dakota, land of... land of... um. What the hell is in South Dakota? At the time, I'd never set foot in South Dakota. Between then and now, I've visited maybe three times? I don't mean "drove through," though I did, but I also sightsaw. Last time, I was stranded there for three days, but I covered that fun incident when it happened in 2021. However, during none of my trips have I visited the main subject of that 2008 entry. Not yet. Ah, yes. The Crazy Horse Memorial which, as it happens, was begun sixty years ago today I question my grammatical choices at the time, but whatever. From math, I deduce that the onset of construction of the memorial was over 75 years ago now. There follows a raw link which, not surprisingly for a 15-year-old link on the internet, is well and thoroughly broken. Apparently, it was a retrospective on the 60th anniversary of the monument's official beginning. If you're not familiar with this enormous project, here's the Wikipedia link. There's not much else to the blog entry, but I will say this: upon re-reading this today, it was too easy to interpret the last lines as a tribute to General Custer. While it's difficult to remember much about something I wrote a decade and a half ago, I'm certain that wasn't my intention. I should have phrased that better. I'm tentatively planning another one of my cross-country road trips for the end of the month and on into December. Maybe, if the weather works in my favor, I'll pay a visit to the Crazy Horse Memorial. |
| Inspired by "Invalid Item" , though this particular observance wasn't in the suggested prompts. The first Saturday in November is officially: One question I get asked on a regular basis, once someone discovers that I'm a beer snob (which happens pretty quickly, but not as quickly as some people tell you "I'm a vegan."): "So, do you brew your own beer?" No. Not just no, but HELL no. I mean, sure, the process is fascinating, and as with most work, I could watch others do it all day. And I'm glad some people are into that, because that's how we get brewers at craft breweries. So, of course, being curious, I looked into it, and discovered that home brewing is approximately 1% enjoying the product; 3% brewing; and 98% cleaning and sterilizing. Yes, I'm aware those add up to >100%; I'm using hyperbole to emphasize just how much I hate, loathe, and despise cleaning. Why do all that work when I can go to a bar or brewpub and, using the fruits of my other labors, purchase a delicious golden beverage that's the result of other peoples' labor? It's not like diamonds, coffee, smartphones, clothing, avocados, or chocolate; you can be fairly confident that craft beer in the US isn't brewed using slave or child labor. Still, I wanted to take a moment to appreciate that here in the purported Land of the Free, we have the freedom to brew our own beer, if we want to put in the really outrageously tremendous amount of work involved. It wasn't always that way. I'm not just talking about those dark times known as Prohibition, either. Once Prohibition was lifted—an anniversary I also celebrate, coming up next month—it took a while before home brewing was legalized. By "a while," I mean "nearly half a century." Before Prohibition, brewing had mostly been done at home, though industrialization facilitated commercial breweries more and more as time went on. Many, if not most, of the Founding Fathers of the US were brewers (or their spouses were; brewing, like cooking, was considered largely a woman's job). The entire idea of the American Revolution was fomented (as opposed to fermented) in pubs, so beer is in our DNA, which made Prohibition that much more of a slap in the face to Lady Liberty. Amendment XXI to the US Constitution, passed on December 5, 1933, repealed the earlier amendment XVIII that created Prohibition. Yay. But home brewing didn't become legal until 1978, 45 years after the repeal of Prohibition. Thanks, Jimmy! Which is not to say that people didn't break The Law on a regular basis, but the legalization of homebrew led inexorably to our craft beer landscape, which remains the primary reason I travel. Last I checked, which was five minutes ago, there were nearly 10,000 breweries in the US. I'm not even sure how many of those I've visited and/or sampled brew from; my records are spotty, as you might expect after I've had a couple. It's also complicated by the fact that, on average, every week, we lose one and gain two. With that much beer to choose from, why bother making my own? No, if I'm going to do work, it's going to be important work, like figuring out how to visit the 9000 or so that I still haven't. |
| No booze-related observances today, so let's dig into the slush pile. From MIT Press Reader: Alien Dreams: The Surprisingly Long History of Speculation About Extraterrestrials The idea that other worlds might be home to alien beings has been part of our thought for as long as we have been looking skyward. "Surprisingly?" Not for people who read. To feel small, all we have to do is look up. Actually, it makes me feel large, because I live amongst a species that has managed to begin to comprehend that vastness. The sun, the Moon, the stars, the planets, and the Milky Way are evidence enough that Earth is not all that is. It wasn't very compelling evidence to some people. They honestly believed that it was all part of, connected to, and/or made for the sole benefit of the Earth. And for as long as humans have had words, we have been sharing stories about the presumed builders and occupiers of those vaulted heavens: the gods, spirits, angels, and demons who were, in a sense, the first extraterrestrials. Speculation about extraterrestrials has long seemed to me to be the tech-age version of speculation about gods and angels. According to a Cherokee story, for example, the Milky Way is a great web spun across the sky by Grandmother Spider, who used it to reach the other side of the world and bring back the sun. Presumably, they exiled arachnophobes. In one grisly Aztec myth, the war god Huitzilopochtli sprang from his mother Coatlicue’s womb fully grown and fully armored. He beheaded his sister, Coyolxauhqui, who had been plotting to kill Coatlicue, and cast her head into the sky, creating the Moon. The Aztec were hardcore. Materialist interpretations of the cosmos eventually began to take the place of mythological ones. But the idea that there might be other beings in the sky has stayed with us, and it found its first protoscientific roots in Greece in the sixth century BCE. I suppose that the article is making a distinction between supposed supernatural beings that reside in some "up" place (heaven, e.g.) and speculation about some sort of natural or created beings on other worlds. Anaximander, a philosopher who lived in Miletus in modern-day Turkey, contributed one key idea. He was the first to propose that Earth is a body floating in an infinite void, held up by nothing. I'm not able to find, definitively, what idea he replaced with this one, but earlier, another Greek dude, Thales, figured Earth was a giant island floating in an infinite ocean of water. Before that? I don't know. Elephants and turtles holding it up or something. The philosopher Karl Popper called it “one of the boldest, most revolutionary, and most portentous ideas in the whole history of human thought.” People can be right purely by accident, and this seems to be one of those cases. As the article notes, Anaximander was also wrong about a lot of things. How do we know? Science. In the fifth century BCE, the Thracian philosopher Leucippus and his pupil Democritus invented atomism: the belief that the visible universe consists of tiny, indivisible, indestructible atoms, churning in the void without purpose or cause. In this picture, worlds aren’t divinely created; they simply form when enough atoms collide and stick together. And scientists were premature in calling atoms "atoms," as it turned out that they weren't indivisible or indestructible, as has been repeatedly and terrifyingly demonstrated. Both Plato (428–348 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) lambasted Democritus’s idea of a plurality of worlds on theological grounds. And so we come to the philosophical tension that has dominated the world ever since: some natural philosopher or scientist proposes something based on observation, and religious folk react with horror and torches. As Christianity swept across the decaying Roman Empire in the third and fourth centuries CE, the Church Fathers ridiculed and suppressed the Epicureans and their ideas and allowed their writings to burn or crumble. Atomism, the pursuit of pleasure, the plurality-of-worlds idea — all of it slipped into darkness, where, as Wiker observes, “it stayed for nearly a thousand years.” Such as that. But after those dark ages—which weren't as dark as all that, but still held back scientific inquiry in the West—the article goes into the start of the Renaissance and humanist philosophy. Copernicus is central to the story of extraterrestrials not because he believed in them — the question didn’t seem to interest him — but because he was the first person to propose, based on observation and calculation, that Earth was not the center of the visible universe. Oddly enough, it turns out that Earth is the center of the visible universe... if you're standing on Earth. If you were standing on a planet orbiting some unnamed star in the outer reaches of the Andromeda galaxy, that would be the center of the universe. This premise — that there’s nothing particularly special about Earth and that we aren’t in a privileged, central position to observe the universe — would come to be known as the Copernican principle, and it’s at the core of the modern-day case for doing research related to the search for extraterrestrial life (SETI). I've harped on this in here multiple times, but just as it's arrogant to think we're the only sentient life in the universe, it's also arrogant to think that life on other worlds necessarily produces sentience, or, furthermore, looks anything like Earth life. Copernicus knew his theory would provoke religious objections, which may be why he declined to publish it during his lifetime. His follower Giordano Bruno was not so cautious. And as far as I know, the Catholic Church never did issue a proper apology for murdering him. From Democritus to Galileo, thinkers treated the idea that other worlds might be home to alien beings — the word alien comes from the Latin term alius, “other” — with great seriousness. After all, believing in aliens could get you banished or burned at the stake. It is certainly not on religious grounds that I'm a skeptic when it comes to sentient aliens (see, well, a whole bunch of earlier blog entries). I haven't encountered any positive evidence for them. I enjoy Star Trek as much as anyone and more than most, but I doubt we'll find a universe populated by tech-using aliens who play out our own foibles in metaphor. But in 1686 a Frenchman named Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle became the first writer to exploit the subject’s humorous possibilities. Just to be clear, his writing was humor, fantasy, and probably satire, but not science fiction. The people of Venus, Fontenelle mused, are “sunburnt, full of verve and fire, always amorous, loving verses, loving music, inventing celebrations, dances, and tournaments every day.” The inhabitants of Saturn, by contrast, are “quite phlegmatic. … These are people who don’t know what it is to laugh, who always take a day to answer the slightest question asked them.” Just wild-ass guessing here, but I'm pretty sure Venus there was France, and Saturn was England. Whewell pointed out that humans, according to the geological record then being unearthed, had been present on this planet for only an “atom of time.” If Earth had been, in effect, uninhabited through most of its history, then it wouldn’t be surprising if other distant planets were also empty. In any case, he pointed out, no planets around other stars had yet been observed, and many nebulae, star clusters, and multiple-star systems would be unsuitable places for them. I hate, I mean absolutely hate, the fact that I generally agree with that guy, who was one of those who objected to the idea of sentient alien life on theological grounds. Copernicus was correct to revoke Earth’s privileges as the pivot point of the universe, but that insight by itself says nothing about what else might exist in the universe. Exactly. "We're not special" doesn't necessarily mean "We're not alone." Anyway, I've banged on long enough. The article is relatively short, considering that it covers the highlights of over 2000 years of speculation about other worlds and alien life, and it's definitely worth a read, wherever you fall on the "aliens do(n't) exist" spectrum. Me? I'm still waiting for real evidence. But that's not going to stop me from enjoying science fiction and fantasy. |
| Something different today, inspired by "Invalid Item" I really don't know who comes up with these promotional or commemorative "days," but they amuse me. Sure, some of them are blatantly commercial, but then, most official holidays are, too. Others are icky heartstring-tuggers, but we have a few of those on the official list, too. The important thing is that, sometimes, there's a day related to fine fermented and/or distilled beverages, such as this one. First, to be clear, the theme of the day is the beer style. The word "stout" itself, as the above link indicates, initially meant proud or brave, but acquired the meaning of strong... though, even later, it became a less offensive way to call someone fat. But that was after we started calling certain beers stout for their strength. Now, sure, you can read the text at the link, which, while I can't vouch for its accuracy, tracks with what I know. And you can also view one of the many entries I've done here talking about stout, such as this one from five years ago: "Stout" But I have one thing to add: as noted at the title link, "stout" used to refer to any stronger beer. Gradually, though, the style came to refer only to stronger porters. So, to recap: Ale refers to almost any beer that's not a lager (it's mostly a matter of what kind of yeast is used, but that's not important right now). Porter is ale made with dark roasted grain. Stout used to be more intense anything, but now is reserved for more intense porter. But that wasn't enough, so they had to invent the imperial stout. A quick rundown of how the first imperial stout came to be can be found here, in another of my earlier entries: "The Yeast You Can Do" And now, "imperial" is used to modify any beer style that has a higher than normal alcohol content. Imperial stout, such as one of my all-time favorites, Old Rasputin. Imperial lager. Imperial pumpkin ale. That sort of thing. Amusingly, imperial porter. Such is the evolution of language, style, and beer. Sure, these definitions can get a bit fuzzy. Where does porter end and stout begin? What's the ABV cutoff between metric and imperial? (No, regular beer isn't called metric; it's just one of my stupid puns.) Is it possible to have a beer that's both ale and lager? (Yes. Cream ale.) These things are at least as much art and marketing as science. It just so happens that I have some Old Rasputin waiting for me right now. Perhaps it's time for breakfast. |
| Well, BBC, if you're trying to frighten me into once again giving a shit about climate change... congratulations. Imagine a clutter of hipsters squatting around a crackling campfire. Shadows flicker, unexplained lights glimmer from the inky depths of the surrounding forest. Engaged in the time-honored tradition of telling scary stories in the darkness, one of them holds a flashlight under his bearded face, casting unnatural shadows and highlighting where he'd forgotten to snip off a stray whisker strand. He pauses in his tale, scanning the rapt audience until he's sure he has their undivided attention. "And then," he intones, "they discovered that all of their beer... had turned into Coors Light!" Everyone: "Gasp!" Yeah, they're hipsters, so they actually say "gasp" instead of gasping. Anyway. I don't think this article is saying it'll be quite that bad, but it's scary enough: Global warming is changing the quality and taste of beer, scientists have warned. "Weather events will get more extreme." "Meh." "Sea level will rise, inundating coastal cities." "Whatever; the people can move." "We'll lose agricultural production." "So? It'll just relocate." "Beer will taste worse." "Holy fuck, something needs to be done right now!" Though I don't know if it'll really change any minds. We already know it's going to destroy chocolate and coffee production, and still not enough people care to do anything about it. Hotter, longer and drier summers are predicted to worsen the situation, and could lead to beer becoming more expensive. Beer always becomes more expensive. If it ever drops in price, they tax it to make up the difference. Hops, the flower of the hop plant, are the crucial fourth ingredient in the beer brewing process - alongside water, yeast and malt. They are added before the boiling process to add bitterness, but can also be added afterwards to change the overall flavour. Yeah, thanks, but no. I mean, yes, adding hops is important for flavor and aroma, but the reason we started with hops in the first place is that they're a preservative, and keep the beer from going bad as quickly. Especially important in the time before refrigeration, or after we stop producing electricity. Farmers have been working to adapt their growing practices to improve yields, such as moving farms higher up valleys where there is more rainfall, and installing irrigation systems. Irrigation systems are great, until their sources dry up, too. Which they will. In summary, we're doomed, and we won't even have decent beer to drown our doominess in. |
| It's a 2.5-year-old article from LitHub, but it's not like style ever goes out of style, right? Parul Sehgal once argued that style “is 90 percent punctuation.” Sure, not like anyone grumps about word choice. As John Mayer once apparently said, for some reason, “Ladies, if you want to know the way to my heart: good spelling and good grammar, good punctuation, capitalize only where you are supposed to capitalize, it’s done.” Apparently, dudes could get away with anything. After all, even among experts, there are disagreements, some of them oddly vehement. (What inner forces would compel someone to demonize or deify the semicolon?) Oh, I don't know... search my blog for "semicolon" and you might find out. (I'm a fan of it, obviously.) Then the article goes into the punctuation marks in general. I'll only highlight the ones I agree with: (semicolon) In compiling the sentence, efficacy—or, more precisely, precision—is important; capacity is important; and clarity is important. This kind of writer, at least, doesn’t think in little stoppered declarative sentences. It isn’t like that. Not really ever. Perhaps for some people. But not for us. For those of us whose thoughts digress; for whom unexpected juxtapositions are exhilarating rather than tiresome; who aim, if always inadequately, to convey life’s experience in some semblance of its complexity—for such writers, the semi-colon is invaluable. -Claire Messud I have never heard of this author before, but that makes me want to seek her work out. (exclamation point) Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. -Elmore Leonard I think this is one of those things that's going to be different depending on what you're writing. But yeah, I believe in using bangs (easier to say than "exclamation point") sparingly so as to maintain their power. Unlike cuss words, which, as my mom's family was from New York City and my dad was a sailor, to me, are really just punctuation marks. (em-dash) Don’t you find it annoying—and you can tell me if you do, I won’t be hurt—when a writer inserts a thought into the midst of another one that’s not yet complete? Strunk and White—who must always be mentioned in articles such as this one—counsel against overusing the dash as well: “Use a dash only when a more common mark of punctuation seems inadequate.” - "many editors" Contrary to what I said above, I don't really agree with this, but as with the bang, sparingly is good. I can see right through this writer's ham-handed attempt to convert people to their point of view by deliberately overusing it. (comma) [On her editor, Bob Gottlieb, who famously “was always inserting commas into Morrison’s sentences and she was always taking them out”] We read the same way. We think the same way. He is overwhelmingly aggressive about commas and all sorts of things. He does not understand that commas are for pauses and breath. He thinks commas are for grammatical things. We have come to an understanding, but it is still a fight. -Toni Morrison Oscar Wilde rather famously once wrote: "In the morning I took out a comma, but on mature reflection, I put it back again." As the most-used punctuation mark apart from the period ("full stop" for those of you across the pond), it's subject to a great deal of wasted words and time. I admit to feeling somewhat judgemental toward people who misuse them, but I can't always articulate why they're misused in a given instance. I'm more judgemental about apostrophe abuse. (hyphen) No quote here. I did a whole blog entry on it a while back: "Dashing" . In it, I overused and misused emdashes, so take it as you will.(period) Do we really have to argue about full stops? James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. -Cormac McCarthy James Joyce is not a good model for anything, and now I have even less desire to read anything McCarthy wrote. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate. -McCarthy again And that sentence, folks, should be in the dictionary as a sample under "irony." To be clear, I'm not trying to claim I'm always right. I'm aware that I overuse semicolons sometimes (as well as parentheses), and get things wrong on occasion. Especially here, where every entry is a first or second draft. But that doesn't mean I don't consider these things. |
| So you don't want to live on this planet anymore? Everything About Mars Is The Worst But this jerk planet is still humanity’s best hope for another home in the cosmos. The idea of life on Mars (whether alien or transplanted from Earth) is obviously one of the oldest themes in science fiction and fantasy. It's so pervasive that some people take for granted that 1) we will colonize Mars and 2) at some point after we do, the colonists will rebel and declare independence, most likely resulting in a war. If 1 then 2, because Mars is, after all, a god of war, and because all colonies eventually revolt; but 1 is still questionable. At first glance, Mars seems pretty nice. Compared to the other planets we know of that aren't Earth, sure. No other world in the solar system offers us this chance. Mercury is way too close to the sun. Nearby Venus has far too much atmosphere, whose pressure and noxious gases would crush and choke visitors from Earth. I vaguely recall a thing I linked here a while back that ran the numbers and concluded that the closest planets to Earth, on average, are 1) Mercury 2) Venus 3) Mars. I think it depends on how you calculate it. If this doesn't make sense, consider all the time that these planets spend on the other side of the solar system from us. And yet, thanks to quirks of orbital dynamics, it's easier to get to Mars. Which doesn't mean it's easy. At night, temperatures drop to -100 degrees Fahrenheit. Dust devils and shifting sands cover up solar panels and will test even the most tightly sealed spacesuits and habitats. During dust storm season, Martian winds can stir up haboobs that cover the entire globe in clouds of sun-blotting microscopic particles. That's with an atmosphere that's less than 1% the density of our own troposphere. Also, "haboobs" still makes me chuckle because I'm actually 12 years old. Humans have been slinging spacecraft Marsward for 57 years, and we’re still not even batting .500. It has been pointed out that Mars is the only world believed to be populated entirely by robots. So far, the U.S. is the only country to land anything on Mars, and we’ve stuck the landing on eight of nine attempts. If I recall correctly (and I might not), the reason the one mission failed is that someone forgot to convert metric to imperial units or vice-versa, which is actually kinda hilarious. Anyway, the article continues with details of some of the technical challenges, which I won't go into. Numerous SF authors have, naturally, imagined possible ways around each of them, up to and including terraforming. I've done a bit of fictional speculation along those lines. But I've read enough science fiction to know that it's not going to end well, in any case. |
| Today's callback is a difficult one, and I'm not sure I have the mental energy for it this morning. The original entry was from about two years ago: "Man" The article I referenced there was pretty new when I wrote that, and it's still up. If you don't want to read the earlier entry (understandable, though I promise the entry, if not the article, is short), here it is again.My intro then: "I can admit when I just don't understand something. This is one of those times." And I can't say I've developed a full, nuanced understanding now, two years later. The comments and later blog entry on the topic from Elisa the Bunny Stik  did help me to comprehend some things, but it's just not a subject I'm attuned to.For one thing, I thought, for the vast majority of my life, that being a man simply meant that I was in possession of a todger. Presumably, when I was born, the doctor or nurse checked me out, saw a tallywhacker, and said something like "It's a boy!" I learned of this practice at a fairly young age, and also saw it used on farm and domestic animals, so my mind went "If you see a wangdoodle, that means it's male. Therefore, 'man' is simply defined as an adult human with a pecker." All that other superfluity, such as "boys have shorter hair" (I didn't always, and don't now) or "girls wear dresses" (they don't always, and historically, boys wore dresses too) just seemed like a decision we collectively made as a society, one which could be reversed. Now I see that this stuff is what people mean by "social construct." And it still feels optional to me. After all, my cats don't have a gender identity. Their gender is simply their biological sex. The queens don't wear makeup or hair bows, and the toms don't deliberately grow bushy beards or smoke pipes. Even being surgically altered doesn't change what pronouns you use for the animal. More recently, I realized that this kind of thinking gets you labeled a transphobe, and no amount of denial of that on your part can ever change that label. It's far easier to change your gender than to get people to stop calling you a transphobe. It's kind of like if you say "I'm not an alcoholic," everyone will conclude that you are, in fact, an alcoholic. Especially if you're drunk and slur the words. Anyway, that kind of thinking is why I always considered those outward markings of "manliness" to be superficial and optional. Then, later in life, I realized that I was wrong. I can admit that, too; I'm man enough. So I won't bother offering any support for my assertion that I in no way fear (or hate) trans people. Think what you will of me; I don't care. And that brings me to the actual crux of the matter, at least for me, and for now: people seem to care a great deal about what others think of them, even, in some cases, when they claim not to. In another grand cosmic coincidence (see yesterday's entry for the last time this happened), one of my favorite webcomics touched on this very subject today. {xlink:https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/escape-2}This link should be as permanent as anything is on the internet. In the comic, a man (you can tell from his clothes, hairstyle, and facial features) goes to visit the archetypal Hermit on the Mountain (you can tell from the mountain, his robe/dress, and his beard). His question begins: "Wise Master, how do I escape? I'm a social ape. I'm obsessed with status. All my actions, even private ones, can be perfectly explained if you assume I'm seeking the esteem of other apes." I'll tell you what, though: once I found a way to live that does not require the approval, or escaping the disapproval, of other social apes, I found a freedom that most people can't even conceive of. Once I stopped trying to peacock or scrabble for this mysterious "status" crap, life became a whole lot easier. In short, I'm becoming the Hermit on the Mountain, and I'm okay with that. One other unrelated thing about my earlier entry: Yes, I used to do Merit Badge Mini-Contests. I stopped because readership dwindled (or at least the number of commenters; being not obsessed with status, I don't often check my readership statistics) and because I quit doing entries at midnight in favor of being free to drink in the evenings. The schedule is much more flexible, these days, so it's harder to do deadlines. But I'm also inclined to be generous, so who knows? I may start that up again in some form. |
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