Well, the hops are coming up like gangbusters. Since I’m expecting them to grow quite high this year, I’ve built a trellis out of electrical conduit and twine.
The crossbar is 10 feet long, and around 12 feet high. The poles are driven three feet beneath the ground to avoid frost heave.
I’ve trained a couple of bines up from each plant, and pruned the others. You can sort of see them in the photo, but the light isn’t all that great. I’ll have more photos as the bines grow.
An adaptation of my old Summer Ale recipe, with a little more malt, and a little less honey. I named it Bachelor Ale because Jasper and I were living the bachelor lifestyle the weekend I brewed it.
Brewed 3/22/2008
11 gallons
9 lb Dry extract,Pilsner Light (Briess)
2.00 lb Caramel Malt – 80L (Briess)
1.00 oz Magnum (US) (old 2) [12.5 %] (60 min)
2.00 oz US Goldings [4.65 %] (15 min)
2.00 oz US Goldings [4.65 %] (2 min)
Fermentis US-05 yeast /Nottingham Ale yeast (split batch)
Measured Original Gravity: 1.050 SG
Est Bitterness: 31.8 IBU
Est Color: 10.7 SRM
I used a hop bag for the hops this time, which helped immensely in getting the wort into fermenters this time. I hope it won’t lower the utilization too much.
The Continental Illinois Bank (now Bank of America) building.
The Continental Illinois Bank building. Surprising that they have left the name up for the last 25 years.
12 Pounds Clover Honey
3 Pounds Mesquite Honey
4 tbsp bread yeast (boiled to provide yeast nutrients)
2 packages Red Star Montrachet yeast
Estimated OG: 1.126
It’s bubbling away with none of the sulfurous notes noted in the pyment-cyser last year, which seems to indicate that the bread yeast makes a good nutrient.
Seanbaby’s Super Friends Page – Lex Luthor
Lex Luthor had cameras everywhere. It didn’t matter if Jayna was on the toilet or if Superman was 3 galaxies away enjoying a bowl of cereal, Lex Luthor could put it up on the big screen if he wanted. Sometimes, if you were too lucid while you were watching the show, you’d notice, but most times you didn’t care that Luthor was watching a tight closeup of a couple Super Friends fixing a satellite. Luthor had to have had the hugest collection of blackmail tapes. His tapes at home are probably labelled “French Ambassador with Transvestite Hooker,” “Prime Minister Eating what he Found in his Nose,” and “Monkey Fucking Dog.” Why did he go through with all the complicated mind control bullshit when he could have quietly extorted money from every country’s government without the Super Friends even knowing? And if they did find out, just threaten to release the tapes of Wendy and Cyborg’s Titanium Pleasure Arm.
Glenn Greenwald reports:
Obama fails his first test on civil liberties and accountability — resoundingly and disgracefully
Two weeks ago, I interviewed the ACLU’s Ben Wizner, counsel to 5 individuals suing the subsidiary of Boeing (Jeppesen) which had arranged the Bush administration’s rendition program, under which those 5 plaintiffs had been abducted, sent to other countries and brutally tortured. Today the Obama administration was required to file with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals its position in this case — i.e., whether it would continue the Bush administration’s abusive reliance on the “state secrets” privilege to prevent courts from ruling on such matters, or whether they would adhere to Obama’s previous claims about his beliefs on “state secrets” by withdrawing that position and allowing these victims their day in court.
Yesterday, enthusiastic Obama supporter Andrew Sullivan wrote about this case: ”Tomorrow in a federal court hearing in San Francisco, we’ll find out if the Obama administration intends to keep the evidence as secret as the Bush administration did.” As I wrote after interviewing Wizner two weeks ago: ”This is the first real test of the authenticity of Obama’s commitment to reverse the abuses of executive power over the last eight years.” Today, the Obama administration failed that test – resoundingly and disgracefully
No justice, it seems. Damn it to hell.
Back when I was in graduate school, there was a Foucault pendulum hanging in an alcove outside the physics building. This was a rather large affair, stretching from the tenth floor to the third floor, which was at ground level. At the bottom was a heavy three-foot brushed-aluminum ball, and an electromagnetic device to keep it moving. This device did not work, and all the time I was there, the pendulum hung straight down.
I was studying for my final exam in Really Hard Differential Equations (better known as Classical Mechanics) one night, when a fellow student and I decided that a nice study break would be to try and get the Foucault pendulum moving again.
From the tenth floor.
With water balloons.
It turns out that a 3-foot metal ball is a lot harder to hit from 70 feet with a water balloon than it sounds. Before long, the alcove looked like the surface of the Moon, as the water balloons made craters in the gravel covering the ground. No problem, making the craters was fun, too — so much fun that when we ran out of balloons, we went out to buy more.
Eventually, though, we figured it would be best to get back to studying, so as a finale, we made the Queen Mother of all water balloons. I’m certain that it wasn’t actually a foot in diameter as I seem to remember, but it was big enough that we had to carry it up to the tenth floor in a bucket.
We dumped the bucket over the ledge, and watched it fall to the ground, at which point the safety glass separating the alcove from the building’s lobby went totally white. When we went downstairs to see what we’d done, there was a hole in the glass about ten feet above the ground.
Partly because we wanted to be honest, and partly because we figured we’d get caught anyway, we went to the campus cop shop and told them something along the lines of “there’s some broken glass at Stevenson Center. That was us, sorry. Send us a bill.”
We never got a bill, but I was talking to the department administrator a few months later, and he made sure to mention that they were pulling out the pendulum and putting in a picnic area because “you never know what sort of hijinks students are going to get up to next.” That was the last I ever heard of it, except from my sisters, who seem to remember the incident more distinctly than I do.
So I climbed on Lori’s Wii Fit last night. Dang am I obese, and the yoga routines were embarrassing. I used to be able to do this stuff, dang it!
Still, I guess my balance is pretty decent; I tend to lean back a little too much, but other than that, I do okay.
Chuck D
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the 19th century naturalist of the same name, see Charles Darwin.
For what it’s worth, I left it in.
If you are the type to go around insulting random strangers, it is likely that one of them is going to sock you on the nose. Make no mistake; this would be wrong, and the person who assaulted you should be penalized.
Don’t think, however, that you’ll find a sympathetic ear in me; “he wouldn’t have hit you if you hadn’t been such an asshole” would be my likely response.
I know a guy who is a Mormon, and he tells me stories about protests in California over his church’s role in helping pass Proposition 8. If the stories are to be believed, some of the protestors have crossed the line into tresspass, and even assault. Make no mistake, this behavior is wrong, and the people doing it should be penalized.
I just don’t want to hear any complaints about it. They wouldn’t be doing this if the Mormons hadn’t been such assholes on this issue.
