Non-Consensual

One of my friends had a scary and awful experience New Year's Eve; I think she has handled it very well, and she wrote up her experience here: people.tribe.net/kimonogirl/blog so that people can hopefully learn something and someone else can avoid this happening to them. The post is friends-locked, but if you want to read it she will probably friend you.

The lessons are:

Not only does "no" mean no, but also "too messed up to contemplate the question" means no.

Keep an eye on your friends at Burner events and make sure if they're really drunk or whatever, there isn't anything happening they might not be in control of that they wouldn't want.

Upper Newport Bay Bike Trail

I took some pictures ( jason.dragoness.net/bike/bikeroute.html ) when I biked around Upper Newport Bay this morning. I'm probably moving up closer to LA soon, and I'm already feeling pre-nostalgic.

Diet Cel-Ray Redux

So, I think I got it. A glass of half grapefruit soda and half club soda with 1-2 tsp of the weaker celery-infused vodka mentioned in the previous entry is pretty close and quite good. Unless you hate celery, that is - then I don't think I can help you.

Thanks to all my friends who offered advice without which this soda would not have been possible!

Synthesizing Diet Cel-Ray

The current owners of Dr. Brown's Soda discontinued the diet form of Cel-Ray. Cel-Ray is great stuff; not liking it is a sign of an immature palate. So, I'm trying to fake up some Diet Cel-Ray. I figured I needed some sort of liquid celery flavoring and maybe Diet Canada Dry, since Cel-Ray has been said to taste a bit like ginger ale.

Rather than look for liquid celery flavoring, I made my own. Lena suggested infusing the celery into vodka. I tried this, but instead of celery I used crushed celery seed. I added a similar volume of sugar, since this seems to help many other flavors infuse into vodka: evidently, I'm doing alchemy rather than chemistry. I made two batches; one with about 15g of celery seed in .2l of vodka (for making soda), and one with 10g of celery seed in .5l of vodka with no sugar (for making Bloody Marys or something - I had all this extra vodka and was running out of celery seed...) I used Ketel One, which is a decent vodka - the internet suggests that good vodka is going to have less strong flavor of its own, which is what I wanted. And, even premium vodka is not all that expensive - a .75l bottle of Ketel One is about $20.

Once it had sat for three days, the stronger batch was starting to get a little bit of bitter taste, which is a sign that the spice has been infusing long enough. After pouring both batches through a coffee filter to remove the seeds, I put 5 tsp of the strong batch into a can of (regular) Canada Dry; that was too much. (I had previously tried 3 tsp - in retrospect, that was about right, so I may have enough here to do a 12-pack, and theoretically the full bottle could do 50 cans in this manner). It doesn't taste like Cel-Ray, it tastes like ginger ale with a strong celery flavor, but it has about the right amount of celery flavor.

Next I'll experiment with different sodas.

Revenant Skunk

Tonight I ate with my dad at the Chart House; we were in the weird situation of the tail end of a period where their kitchen was overwhelmed by the Thanksgiving rush, so there were a bunch of drunk, angry customers cursing about the service, but ours was great (however, these folks said their food was better than ours, so technically it wasn't "a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat.")

Later I couldn't sleep because I had been reading something agitating - or maybe it was the tryptophan in the turkey; no wait, I had fish - so I went out for a walk. I have a frequent walk route which passes through a narrow park between expensive houses full of what the Communists would tell you are Bad People. These people have had a long-running battle with skunks: a skunk will spray one of their dogs; they will call in the skunk patrol, who will largely exterminate the skunks; but come autumn, a new crop of skunks will hatch to resume the fight - and this was the first skunk of the season. She was lurking in a bush, but nature has designed the skunk so that in full moonlight even lurking in a bush she proclaims "Hey, skunk here!"

The skunk was a good omen! I was cheered. And I was ok before, cheery but agitated, now I was just doubly cheery.

I passed from Revenant Skunk Park onto King Street, where the People are even Worse and the houses are nice beyond nice. This is the farthest point on earth from Black Rock City. And then out of the darkness, a guy wished me a happy Thanksgiving and wondered if I wanted a shot of his Smirnoff! I had some; it was just like home. His friend staggered out from behind a car and worried that they had just caused the downfall of a Mormon Missionary, but I assured him that no, there was only one of me (in case he couldn't tell) and while he maybe didn't believe this we both agreed that I wore no tie.

Maybe it's ok to have mood swings if they are in response to stimulus swings. it would be deranged to NOT have mood swings in these circumstances! As my friend said, "yay booze!" And Happy Thanksgiving, and To All A Good Night.

Moral Hazard Maze

Yesterday some friends took me to walk around The Woodlands, a nice area outside of Houston. The town had built a hedge maze for the children. They weren't having much luck actually growing in the hedges on the walls (and it takes some serious brown thumb to fail to grow a hedge in Houston) but the maze had a wonderful innovation: if the kid takes a wrong turn and ends up in a dead-end, he is confronted with a big sign that contains a harmful fable! It increases the excitement of a maze if you risk being messed up for life!

I paraphrase the first one:

There was a tortoise who had a very nice shell. He saw birds flying in the sky and thought flying would be pretty cool. A couple of birds came down and said they would carry a stick between them, and if he clamped his powerful jaws onto it he could fly with them. He did this; it was as wonderful as he had imagined! The birds said, "Isn't this great?" The tortoise said, "It sure aiieeeeeeeee" for he had opened his jaws and plummeted to his death on the pointy rocks below. Moral: you were born to work in McDonald's; don't try to go to college.

Presumably eventually the children who make wrong turns in the maze will fail in life, thus gaining lower reproductive fitness, and the residents of The Woodlands will evolve one-trial maze learning. Now THAT'S a master planned community!

Capybaras

In the 16th century, for reasons lost to history, the Catholic Church declared that capybaras (giant South American water rats, for those not in the know) were fish; this mistake has never been corrected. This means that they can be eaten on Lent, which they are in various parts of South America. The meat either looks and tastes like pork (according to wikipedia) or looks like beef and tastes fishy (according to www.nysun.com/article/11063 ). As fish, it may also be kosher (but maybe not, Alla says catfish aren't even kosher, which is a wise decision actually, catfish are gross), which would make it the ultimate holy meat - although I fear the method of deciding what is a fish is not "does the Pope say it's a fish?"

Basic Russian

Lately there's been some influx of Russians into my life, so I've been reading my father's old Russian textbook, Basic Russian by Domar (copyright 1961). It starts each chapter with a dialogue in Russian that's designed for the student to be able to pick his way through. These dialogues are great! Really they ought to be translated and get their own book.

Dialogue #1: "I Suck": In which the teacher and student identify themselves, and the student confesses that he can't read or speak Russian worth a damn. The teacher reiterates this point in various ways.

Dialogue #2: "I'm Sorry, I Really Really Suck!" In which the inattentive student is turned in by his classmates for not paying attention, and must discourse on the topic. He is then chastised by the teacher and the other students.

Dialogue #3: "Yes, I Still Suck. Got Any Smokes On You?" In which a surprising change of subject occurs, and the despairing student turns to tobacco. Followed by musings on the inconsistencies of life, and the horrors of nicotine addiction.

I'm now plowing through #4, in which we learn nouns (that is, In which the student is not allowed to go to a variety of exciting buildings, or interact with various objects, but instead must stay in the reading room and not smoke.)

Exploding Beer

This morning I was startled by a loud crunch-and-tinkle of breaking glass in the next room. I thought someone had thrown something through a window, but I couldn't find anything out of place. Later Alla found it: a bottle of Pyramid Hefeweizen in our breakfast cereal closet had exploded. It exploded hard - shards of glass were embedded deeply in the walls and shelving. The cereal boxes were all soaked in beer and perforated with glass. Alla had to use a knife to get the bigger shards out of the walls.

I poked around online to see why this happens. Apparently if you bottle the beer before it's done fermenting, the fermentation will continue in the sealed bottle and the gas pressure can increase until it explodes. The fermentation will go longer than expected if you add too much sugar, for example adding the sugar twice (which, says the all-knowing web, is a common error among homebrewers). Indeed this is a very sweet beer; the bottle that exploded smelled extra sweet.

Or it could be the Terrorists.

Gripes about Close Encounter Ratings Scale

In my previous entry I mentioned a close encounter of the fourth kind being eating the alien. Well, I looked up the actual Hynek closeness scale ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_encounter ), and I am Very Disappointed. As I guess one might expect given American culture, the scale gives primary placement to violence - the top-rated alien encounter is Kind 6, which is close encounter resulting in injury or death. So if I
- have sex with the aliens
- have dinner with the aliens
- eat the aliens for dinner
- shoot one of the aliens and mount his head over my fireplace next to the other aliens
- am sued by the aliens
I'm still stuck at Kind 3, and the Bloecher Subtypes aren't even relevant. (I guess the lawsuit one might be the Kind 5, if they don't show up in person but do it through their lawyers....) As far as the Kind-3-Subtypes, whether I engaged in sex/dinner/xenobalism apparently isn't as important as whether we did it at my place or theirs.

Also, what if I see some lights in the sky and wreck my car and get a bruised arm? Is that a maxed-out Sixth Kind encounter? It sure seems like it is. Oh, you've been abducted? Big deal! That's Kind 4, I am totally at 6!