Phriendly Phil’s Velociraptor Pharm n’ Pettin’ Zoo

The fermentation chiller project is on hiatus until I know whether getting a chest freezer makes sense.  Now hop off those tenterhooks.

The Michelle Obama “Whitey” video:

I’ve just set up OpenID sign-on for commenting. What this means is that if you have an OpenID login (which you already have if you use AOL, AIM, Yahoo, Blogger, Flickr, Livejournal, Wordpress.com, and some others) you can login using that.

AOL/AIM users, for example, would use openid.aol.com/screenname as their logon. You’ll be briefly whisked away to an AOL logon site that will ask for your passowrd, and when you’re done with that, you’ll come back here.

You don’t have to use OpenID, but it’s there if you want to.

Since the early 90s, the major brewers have made feints in the direction of the craft brewing movement — does anybody remember the all-malt Miller Reserve line, including their Velvet Stout? These excursions, while definitely in the right direction, have never really gone far enough, and have usually been short-lived to boot.

Still, they’ve done nothing to disabuse me of my idea that the brewmasters at AB, Miller (okay, SABMiller) and Coors (okay, Molson Coors) are real pros, and if the marketing and accounting let them off the leash, they could make a world class Bud (Coors, Miller) Stout.

Apparently Anheuser-Busch has filed for label approval of Bud Ale, due out in October. The label mentions Cascade hops and that it’s brewed “with barley from America’s Heartland,” although it’s not clear whether this will be an all-malt beer.

I’ll probably pick up a sixer when it rolls around in October, to see how it turns out. I’m not expecting too much, but maybe, just maybe, this time the brewmasters are getting to run a little freer.

Thanks to Seen Through a Glass.

EDIT: Read the last paragraph of this.  Like I say, these guys are good — it’s just that making insipid beer is their job.

I don’t know if this is true, but it is very intriguing:

When one of those collections [of souvenir postcards of lynchings] fell into the hands of a professional historian, it opened up a whole large statistical universe of lynching incidents, each of which came with a location, one or more names, dozens or hundreds of faces that can be identified, and importantly, a date. That made it possible to research not just a few lynchings, but hundreds of them, and to compile statistics on what had happened before and after them. And the terrible, but fascinating, bit of secret history turned out to be the immediate aftermath of over half of those lynchings. Over half of those lynchings turned out to involve black men who owned their own successful farms and/or businesses. And the day after the lynchings, those farms and businesses were sold to white neighbors, in closed auctions, for pennies on the dollar, and the surviving real heirs were run out of town. And in a terrifyingly large number of those cases, they were able to show one or more of the following facts. The buyer was the person who made the initial accusation against the victim. And the buyer was a relative of one or more of the following: the mayor, the chief of police, the local minister and/or the municipal judge.

This is leading up to Brad Hicks’ take on the murders in Kirkwood, MO.

…so I will take the easy route and share this line from Andrew Olmsted’s posthumous letter, which I wish I hadn’t gotten to read:

But all the tears in the world aren’t going to bring me back, so I would prefer that people remember the good things about me rather than mourning my loss. (If it turns out a specific number of tears will, in fact, bring me back to life, then by all means, break out the onions.)

I didn’t know Andrew personally, but I enjoyed his writing, and am sad he’s gone.

Who woulda thunk?

“My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face to face you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that. I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person, years after the trial, Jerry Falwell and I became good friends. He would visit me in California and we would debate together on college campuses. I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling.”

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Google Earth now has higher-resolution imagery of Jonesboro, AR.

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…this rings so true.

Back in the day, before marriage, before diabetes, before babies, when I was sleeping a full 8 hours, I could code some nice stuff. Now it’s just a miracle it compiles. When it does.

I also tend to, um, not think. At all.

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I guess it was buying a microscope and subscribing to
Make (which I count as a science mag of sorts) that did it, but I have become even more nerdy than previously, if that is possible.

Pad my score? Me?

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