Second Gen (2003-2016, 2016- )
A Dalek stolen from a Somerset tourist site has been found on Glastonbury Tor after thieves said it was “too hot”. The prop, which was at Wookey Hole Caves, near Wells, for a Doctor Who exhibition, was taken more than a week ago…
Last Thursday, staff found a Dalek plunger arm and a ransom note on a doorstep. The note read: “We are holding the Dalek captive. We demand further instructions from the Doctor.”
Now those are some good weirdos. ‘Cause they are not really real, right? Right?
Isn’t that what is said just before the end?
I got up here in the wee hours to check the stats from the citation in yesterday’s New York Times, page C4 for posterity, and was surprised to see that it does not alter the alignment of the planets.
As you can see, last Friday when I was nothing and a nobody the beer blog had 965 visits from 519 sites. Yesterday when I was a star…I really was, you know…I had 1007 visits from 590 sites.
Woo.
Despite the extremely intersting process and the very intellegent and interested reporter, it appears that I am just never ever taking anything written on page C4 as important at all ever again. No way. That page is just for the likes of me and Sean Penn. You did notice I was one column and 2.5 inches from that big Sean Penn story, right? Oddly, there was a bigger bump here for some reason: 10453 visits from 1742 sites, both up 20% – but nothing on the “Gomery” googling insanity of early April. Sic transit gloria blogi. Google bots clearly do not drink ales and lagers. [You know, I should have gone with that sherry blog idea.]
Sadly it is clear that the goal would have to be getting into Section A of the globe’s paper of record…but Canada never appears in actual news section of the New York Times. Likely any chance of Section A fame would require slipping over the border, something about police tape encircling a northern New York shopping mall and a quote from my mother to the effect that I was, after all, a bit weird growing up.
This is sort of funny if it were not a pathetic business model meeting rude nerds:
Even worse, when lingerers were confronted, they were bellicose. “We get yelled at by people who feel it’s their right” to use Victrola’s Wi-Fi without making a purchase, Ms. Strongin said. Tony Konecny, the shop’s head roaster, added, “It’s rarely a pleasant interaction.”…Some of Victrola’s customers were in a slight state of disbelief when the Wi-Fi was disconnected. One regular customer repeated over and over, “That just doesn’t work for me,” Ms. Strongin said…
More wi-fi freeloader backlash from last month and last year.
So there I am, in the last paragraph 14th story in The New York Times, Business Section, Media and Advertising page, web edition index at 6:37 am Monday morning with the precious URL, all live and linky:
No seized web site or anything. No referrers yet as I can see. Oh well. Wait for the entire workforce of New York City to get to work and turn on their computers to slack off for the morning by flipping through the web edition, I suppose…
It was an interesting process being interviewed via email by the reporter who has lots of web industry writing experience but not a homebrewer or anything. She noticed this post I made January on the nutty idea of an “open source beer”. Too bad they did not use the full quote – which I thought was really helpful – but, true, would have needed a separate section:
I have not tried the beer but think from what is provided that I would not like to try to make it or drink it. Making the beer would be difficult for most homebrewers given the volumes provided. Most homebrewers brew in lots of 20 litre or perhaps double that but an 80 litre boil as required in this recipe would find the brewer facing over 200 pounds of boiling sticky sugar syrup needing transferring by the brewer, a near impossible task in the average kitchen. By contrast, even the small end of the microbrewing scene expects an entry point at the 5 or 7 barrel scale of brewery. One barrel of beer is about 170 litres. Here is some information from the brewery manufacturer DME: which may help understand the scale: http://www.dmeinternational.com/brewing/brewbup/naturalbrew.html. So it is unclear for whom this scale of recipe is devised. Recipes can be scaled up or down but you might want to start with a point that is useful – or even safe – for one type of brewer or another.
That being said, there are issues with the ingredients, too. Beer is basically made of four things: water, yeast, hops and malt. In this recipe, there is detail provided about only hops and malt. As a result, it the same ingredients were used and made with the soft water of Dublin or the hard water of Burton-upon-Trent, England, the resulting products would be very different. These effects can be reproduced by adding water treatments which mimic one location or
another. But without any guidance as to water quality, there is a great deal of variation left to the imagination of the brewer. The same is the case of the yeast. The recipe does not tell us whether it is lager yeast or ale yeast, the two general hemispheres of the beer world. Further, it does not state which of sub-type might be used. Consider this web page of a homebrew supplier which offers 33 ale yeasts and 16 for lager, aside from the 18 for the specialized wheat and Belgian styles of beer: http://www.paddockwood.com/index.php. Selection among these yeasts will greatly affect the outcome of the brewing process. But no guidance is given.
Where there is some guidance, we are still uncertain. We are told that “1 kg of caramel malt” is required. That usually defines a class of malts with a sugary aspect but they differ in the taste they impart according, among other factors, to the degree they are roasted. As a result, a pale crystal malt may give a slight nuttiness to a beer where a dark one provides a strong raisiny flavour. Just saying “caramel malt” in not specific enough. Similarly, the recipe includes 4 kg of sugar but we are not told if it is corn or cane, light yellow or dark demarara or even whether Belgian candi sugar is to be used. Sugar is not sugar is not sugar.
So in the end it is very difficult to determine what a brewer might do with the recipe as it is really only part of a recipe. If you take the information provided and run it through a popular beer recipe calculator used by homebrewers for planning you get a beer which is somewhat pale and normal strength at 5.2% but a bit cloying due to the moderate hops and likely richness of some residual sugars. It would also have no to very rich yeastiness with anything from a slight nuttiness to a strong raisin flavour. Here are the results from when I ran the test:
http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator?6074722#tag. Except for the odd ingredient “300 g Guarana beans” this could be half the beers I have ever encountered depending on how the unstated variables are addressed by the particular brewer. It is interesting to note that guarana bean is included in the new Budweiser product, B-to-the-E: this author does not find that product very pleasant:
http://www.wisinfo.com/postcrescent/news/beerman/beer_20024917.shtml
I do go on, don’t I.
None
Just for the record, I am really pleased my efforts under the category “Tantrama City” have attracted a referral through a seach for “how+to+get+an+acoa+grant” on Google.
Beauty.
A bit thick at soccer last night. Blork says it has something to do with northern fires and it is not smoggy smog, the brown air of August. This* tells the whole story, if you can handle the truth.
A thrilling 0-0 tie against the break away schismistic Red Rovers. You see my team, the Golden Nuggets, of last year has morphed into two teams, the Nuggests and the Rovers according to what jersey you grabbed. Fancy, too. Numbered shorts. Except one or two have the number on the butt. Glory stories? They would all feature the word “almost” I fear. I did ding the point where the cross-bar meets the upright with a curling corner kick. That would have been great. I was almost…OK…I see your point.
*
It is always sad – yet funny – seeing someone with inordinate access to resources doing something incredibly stupid:
A South African man who paid a relative to serve a jail sentence in his place has finally been put behind bars. Engineer Rupert Reddi was sentenced in 2001 for kidnapping and assault. After an appeal process, a man believed to be Mr Reddi was imprisoned in 2003. Three months later, prison officials discovered that the prisoner in question was in fact Roland Archery, a relative of Mr Reddi. Both men have now been sentenced to three years’ jail for the fraud. Mr Reddi was originally sentenced to four months’ jail in connection with an assault on his employees following a robbery at a factory he owned.
Isn’t it funny when the Boingsters go totally Dad and denounce average students for disagreeing with what they say or not worshipping because Boingsters are, like, Wired-hired bloggers [despite not having much to add] and, ummm, they are older people so…you know…you better respect us ’cause…we know better than you?
Lesson: everyone goes Oldie Olson. Some know when it is time to admit it.