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So here’s a neat site that I’m surprised I hadn’t come across sooner: how to brew your own root beer, using simple household equipment.
I’ve always thought the idea of brewing your own beer was really cool, but I don’t drink. I do love root beer, though, so when I saw this, my interest was piqued, and a short trip to the grocery later (alas, I had to make do with McCormick’s root beer extract), I was good to go.
And it worked out pretty much as advertised. Sat on the counter for three days, then I put it in the fridge overnight, and poured some today. It’s…interesting. It tastes a LOT more like regular beer (at least, what I remember beer to taste like), which prolly has to do with the fermenation of the sugar by the yeast. Definitely an acquired taste, but it was pretty easy to acquire, if you get my meaning. It’s not nearly as sweet as the stuff you get at the store, either, enough so that I might increase the sugar by 1/4 cup for the next batch just to see what happens.
I dunno if it’s gonna displace Henry Weinhard’s as the best root beer on the planet, but I finally have my own microbrewery! :)
A little while back I made one of my occasional trips to Costco to get things you normally get at Costco. One of my purchases was one of those large boxes that contain an Assortment ‘O’ Chips, for to enjoy with lunch. This particular one apparently contains every product Frito-Lay has ever made: Fritos, Lays, Ruffles, Cheetos, Doritos (in not one but two flavors), the whole deal.
Which brings us to today: I prepared lunch, and selected a bag of Nacho Cheesier! (their words, not mine) Doritos to accompany my meal. And emblazoned boldly on the bag was the phrase “Now Better Tasting!”
And it occurred to me: I’ve seen this claim on bags of Doritos at least five separate times over the course of my life. The R&D department at Frito-Lay must be the busiest in the nation. I fully expect to see a bag in a year or two that says “We Swear, We Got It Right This Time.”
I am forced to conclude that Doritos must have tasted like complete ass in the 70’s.
Here’s some dumbassery for The Four Of You: Snoop Dogg was in town over the weekend, and some asshat jumped up on stage and promptly got a beating from Snoop’s posse.
In and of itself, pretty damn funny, if not completely uncommon. But here’s the kicker, the last line of the linked article:
“They beat me like a slave,” he said, holding an ice bag to his face.
A little free advice to Mr. Monroe, when he can see out of that eye again: Playing the race card at a rap concert isn’t going to get you any sympathy. Dumbass.
There’s a new building going in at my end of Lake City Way, next to the Walgreen’s. I was curious as to what it was, ‘cuz it looked like it could be a new restaurant of some kind, and it would be nifty to have new dining options close to home.
Well, I drove by today, and the building now has Coming Real Soon Now signs on it. It’s two businesses, apparently. One is a Quizno’s, which totally works for me, as I think they are vastly superior to Subway, and the other is a Starbucks.
Which means, now, within a five minute drive from my home, I can reach no less than FOUR discrete Starbucks stores.
Yep. I live in Seattle.
Sorry I haven’t posted in a while…I had a nasty cold that kicked in hard RIGHT after my birthday, and then I apparently pulled my left hamstring (I have NO idea how this happened…one afternoon I noticed a little ache in my calf, and then a day later I was limping) just as the cold was getting better. So I’ve been laid up for a while, which does not make for entertaining blogging experiences, unless you enjoy reading stuff like:
Monday, May 16, 2005: Sat at home. Kept leg up. Watched Tivo.
Tuesday, May 17, 2005: Sat at home. Kept leg up. Watched Tivo.
You get the idea. Anyhow, today was the first day the leg was feeling well enough to brave the grocery store, and the cupboards were getting sparse (thank you again, Jenn & Abby, for the stay of execution over the weekend), so off to Albertson’s I go. And as I passed by the medicinal teas, I spotted this out of the corner of my eye:
I swear to GOD this isn’t Photoshopped. This was an actual product. Perhaps we can look forward to Hershey’s Highway Bathroom Tissue next….
(Which I suppose you would need after a nice steaming cup of Smooth Move, wouldn’t you?)
Later this morning, 3:41 AM to be exact, marks my 34th successful circumvention of the sun. I’d like to take a moment to thank the planet for not killing me yet.
Today also marks the one-year anniversary of one of the greatest moments in San Jose Sharks history: the Game Six victory over the Colorado Avalanche which clinched the series and punched San Jose’s ticket to their first Conference Finals. (Yeah, they had their asses handed to them by Calgary, but we had no idea that was going to happen at the time. So we were pretty stoked.)
Tomorrow, there will be baseball, and the NBA playoffs. There will be no NHL hockey.
So if you’re the type to pour one out (and if you are, fer God’s sake, yer wasting perfectly good alcohol), do me a favor and pour one out for the demise of the NHL season, with hopes that the idjits in charge of negotioations give themselves a rectal craniectomy and get this impasse settled, so that next October we can once again enjoy the greatest game on the planet played at its highest level.
I have a new favorite movie theater in the Seattle area. Cinerama is about to get their asses handed to them.
I went to see The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy at the Loews at Alderwood today. Wow. The place has ample free parking, including a covered garage, and the place is MASSIVE. I estimated the posters on the outside of the building at thirty feet high. The entrance to the building is on the second story, and the atrium when you walk in rivals any arena I’ve ever been to. Just spectacular.
All manner of gastronomic delights were available (including pizza, and dedicated ice cream and coffee stands), and the condiment stands let you apply your own Real Butter Flavored Imitation Motor Oil (and I’m prolly gonna get my Gourmand Card revoked for this, but when I’m at a movie, load that oil on early and often.), and the theater was easily as big as Cineramas, with the raiseable armrests and rocking chairs and stadium seating and all kinds of legroom. Just awesome. THIS is the way to watch a movie. (And did I mention, free parking?)
And the movie? I really liked it. The standard argument from the people who have panned it is “it’s not like the book”. Yes. It’s not. And you know what? I am perfectly fine with that. I’ve already read the book. I have no problem seeing the story told a different way, and with lots of eye candy. There were lots of book references and in-jokes, and they made me happy, and I thought the story was perfectly fine.
And let’s hope they get the folks at Shynola to do the menus and lots of lots of supplementary information for the DVD. Would you buy the DVD if it had a second disc that was basically a functioning Guide? Damn, I would.
The Four Of You know what Starlight Mints are, right? Those little red and white candies that you get with your check at the end of a meal?
Well, after the post office (see below), I drove through Taco Hell ‘cuz I realized I hadn’t had any lunch. And I was delighted to upend the bag when I got home and watch a Starlight Mint tumble out along with my burrito. Back when I was little, when Mom went to drop off Dad’s shirts (My dad has a thing for wool shirts) at the dry cleaner, I used to go in with her and was permitted to select a piece of candy from the dish by the counter, which more often than not contained Starlight Mints. There is hard candy I like more, but I smile whenever I see a Starlight Mint.
So I polish of my burrito, and squeeze the mint from its wrapper, still mildly amused that Taco Hell now takes at least a cursory concern about my breath. I popped the mint in my mouth, and got ONE HELL of a shock:
Starlight Mints are supposed to be PEPPERMINT. Not cinnamon. PEPPERMINT.
My new Palm took a dump on me last night. Turns on to a white screen. For a while the screen was coming back if I did a hard reset, but now it isn’t even doing that. Plus, it’s turning on intermittently. It is, for all intents and purposes, an ex-Palm.
So, this morning, a couple of phone calls with PalmOne, and I’m off to the post office to schlep the thing off to them so they can (they claim “fix”, but I’m thinking more “replace”) it.
And when I’m sending a $250 piece of electronics through the mail, you bet your ass I’m covering myself, so I bought the insurance, which ended up almost doubling my shipping costs.
And while I’m driving home, I think to myself: what the HELL do I have to buy insurance for? Aren’t I ALREADY paying the USPS to take my package and send it to the location I dictate? Doesn’t it seem reasonable to assume that part of this service would include a) the guarantee that the service so contracted is actually carried out accurately, and b) that the parcel arrives in the same condition that it’s sent in?
If I ran, say, a dry cleaner, and one of my machines chewed up a load of laundry, and I didn’t accept responsibility for the problem when the people came back and received a basket of shredded clothes, I would be out of business before you could say Movin’ On Up.
It’s not their official motto, but it’s on a plaque in front of the main post office in New York, so they should be beholden to it anyhow: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
Apparently keeping the package in good shape isn’t a job requirement.
Hey, sorry I haven’t written anything in a while. Let’s just say it’s been an…interesting month. As in the old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”
Fortunately, every so often items come along that are too good to pass up. The Four Of You know (often because you’re the ones playing them with me) that I’m a big fan of board games. And a lot of the games I play are European in origin, which means that on occasion the language used in the game’s directions, cards, and such is not English. Sometimes the language barrier requires a little more effort to play a game, and sometimes, the game is abstract enough that it doesn’t make a difference. The latter is the case with Reiner Knizia’s Einfach Genial, which was published in Europe last year. The English translation is “Simply Ingenious”, but the name given to it in the English-speaking parts of Europe is “Mensa Connections”. It is an excellent game, and was one of the five finalists for the 2004 Spiel des Jahres, one of the higher honors that can be bestowed upon a board game.
The Four Of You have probably heard of Mensa, the society open to people who can score in the top 2% in a standardized intelligence test. I have some opinions about this group, and to a wider extent about intelligence tests as a whole, but they aren’t really germane to this piece, so we’ll save them for another time. (Suffice it to say I’m not a member. By choice.)
At any rate, each year a bunch of them get together and play a boatload of games and decide which of them are fit to carry their “Mensa Select” seal, which means they think that those chosen are good games for smart people to play or something. (Where I come from, Select is the rating given to beef that isn’t good enough to be Choice or Prime.)
(I further feel compelled to point out that if you were to take the top 10 games for a given time period as voted on by the Mensa folks, and the top 10 games for that same period voted on by the knowledgable gaming community at large, the lists would differ significantly. Infer what you will from that.)
Anyhow, I direct you to a letter to the editor of the Seattle Weekly, for the week of December 8-14, 2004:
An interesting concept [Gift Guide 2: Mind, Body, Spirit, “Play, Einstein!” Dec. 1]. Unfortunately, Roger Downey missed a major opportunity. Had he gone to the site of American Mensa (www.us.mensa.org) instead of British Mensa, he would have found information about Mind Games and some 75 games Mensans have tested and designated as Mensa Select over the past 16 years. The list includes such games as Apples to Apples, Scategories, the Poll Game (made in Seattle), and many, many more.
The board game he mentions, “Mensa Connections,” cannot be sold in the United States under our licensing agreement. We tested it last year at our games competition and found it wanting. We did not want the Mensa name on the game in this country.
Jim Blackmore
National Marketing Director,
American Mensa, Ltd.
Thank God for the people of Mensa, for preventing me the unspeakable horror of playing substandard mind-rotting games! Oh, and Jim, if you happened across this in a vanity search, get off your damn high horse: The game can absolutely be sold in the States, and in fact has been available in German form for a year. Ya ever hear of this new concept called “importing”? (The fact that you misspelled “Scattergories” is another joke unto itself, but, again, I digress.)
So here’s the punchline: Apparently this year’s Mensa MindGames event came to a close today, and the list of the recipients of the oh-so-coveted Mensa Select rating made its way onto one of the gaming newsgroups I read.
One of the lucky winners? A new release entitled “Ingenious”. Which just happens to be the domestic version….of Einfach Genial.
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