My Cat Appears To Be Malfunctioning


“Explain myself? I don’t have to frikkin’ explain myself…I’m a cat!”

As far as I can tell, I think there are humans on one side of the line and then there are plants and animals on the other. Our cats were mousers. They were brought in for a job and when we moved three and a half years ago to a mouse-free lifestyle, the cats found a way into the luggage. They are pushing seven now and life most early middle agers are starting to show signs…even leak once in a while.

When we first moved we deal with his 12th floor anxiety and a vet prescribed a buck a day kitty-valium. And the other one, the she, proved the old joke “When is a cat like a dog – when she is a bitch”. We bought catnip instead. Kept them stoned until the angstity one straightened out a bit. Now we have another problem and I am bracing for the “overnight stay” recommendation. I wonder if that will trigger the big needle response. Don’t get me wrong, this is a pretty good cat as cats go. The only trouble is he goes all over the place…no, that is unfair – he goes where it is most distasteful. That is a skill.

But I have standards. I will not have a cat that wears a diaper. I will not pay $500 buck. There are too many young cats in the minor leagues waiting for their break.

Delaware: Golden Shower, Dogfish Head, Milton

An imperial pilsner. This is a sort of beer I never imagined I would need to concern myself with. Unlike stouts or pale ales with their history of bigness, surely no one would bother upping the game of brewing the steely king of lagers. No one told Dogfish Head from Delaware, however, and they went ahead and did it as they tell you about at no lack of length on their website, including this:

The big breweries are as guilty of any company in any industry of brainwashing the consumer through the sheer oppressive magnitude and breadth of their marketing efforts. They are selling a brand name and an image with such zeal that they have forgotten about the product behind all of this horseshit and hyperbole – the beer itself. Dogfish Head Golden Shower is the beer itself. A true Pilsner brewed with 100% Pilsner Barley, and impressively hopped using our self-developed continuing-hopping method. At 9% abv it’s also nearly twice as strong as the American, wanna-be pilsners made by the big boys.

If you have read my reviews here before you know I have questions about my relationship with pilsners. I respect the fact as much as the next guy that it is a noble and traditional style but then there is that metallic zing…or is it a zang…that fills my mouth as if I was chewing a quarter pound of four penny nails that have been laying around the shed. So I approach this beer with some trepedation. And some of the low rating BAer reviews are backing that up – like this one:

…Not drinkable at all. Really sad for such a great brewery. I dumped the remainder of my $12 bottle in the toilet, where it belongs. Don’t waste your money on this golden shower…

Yikes. I only paid $8.99 for mine but still. Intersting to note, however, that the highest BA raters consider many of the same elements but like them. I don’t know what to expect now.

The beer pours a very attractive bright burnished gold with a white head that resolves to a rim what with the low carbonation. When you shove your nose into the glass there is plenty of sweet apple and pear concentrate. The first thing I think of when I sipped was triple. It is sort of like a Belgian triple – candy-ish sweetness and all – but also with a fall fruit aspect like calvados. It is also thickish and does not have the overly metallic hop profile I feared – the hops are tightly herbal as much as anything. In fact, it is far more pale malty than anything else. And that is a remarkably well hidden 9%. The beer is not hot in the mouth but it certainly does warm otherwise.

Where does this beer fit in? It is a near neighbour to Belgian golden strong ales like Duval or triples like Chimay Cinq Cents with the white label – but without the bubble gum or candy floss notes Belgian candi sugar provides. A beer to contemplate the coming autumn. A beer to eat apple pie and vanilla ice cream along with, oddly enough. It would be interesting to have this beer condition in a wood cask as there is that butter and/or vanilla richness that could be umphed one notch for experimental purposes.

Friday Chat From The New HQ

A while ago I wondered about the point when a move is really made as opposed to finished. Turns out it is not the beds or the telephone but the stuff on the walls. As soon as you put the framed stuff up, your interior is yours. Forget about the TV. That just costs you an hour of sleep and night.

  • And speaking of losing sleep, if the Red Sox lose both the AL East and the wildcard and miss the playoffs blame this week. They have gone 1 out of 6 against Tampa and KC, two teams who are a combined 57 games back. This is a complete embarassment.
  • We forget sometimes that in all the concerns of the day that there are still the legacies of the last sentury to deal with including Conrad Black. Apparently he has to find more money to give the court confidence he will show up:

    Conrad Black’s bail was raised Thursday by another $1-million (U.S.) in cash, but the erstwhile media baron managed to score one important legal victory: His wife won’t be forced to reveal her financial affairs under oath.

    An interesting morality play.

  • Personally, I avoid technologies that make me feel like I am going to be sick – parachutes, roller coasters and Imax.
  • I find it odd that I am not entirely caught up with the liquid bomb story. I think Al Queda has lost me thanks to the skill of the British police’s anti-terrorism unit. I do not assume all will be well. But they are pretty good at making sure all is well. Maybe Al Queda will be content with reverse psychology as its resources thin and its manpower fades.

Must make coffee. Maybe more later. What stories are you following anyway?

Beer In Japan

I saw this short but somewhat jam-packed story on beer culture in Japan today during my sweep of the entire internet¹ for new amazing tales of beer:

After-hours beer binges are a mainstay of corporate communication between salarymen, bosses and business partners. Red-faced executives, their neckties yanked open to one side, are a fixture of late night train stations. Beer girls with “backpack kegs” rush down the aisles at baseball stadiums to refill fans’ cups. And though the official drinking age is 20, nearly anyone with enough spare change can buy a cold brew at beer vending machines.

Sounds like a land gone mad but I wonder how a Japanese paper might sum up Canadian beer culture in a couple of paragraphs – how would a sports bar fill of people sucking on pitchers look, all staring at the same big screen TV? Or the imaginary line at the doors of bars beyond which beer cannot be carried? Or having to buy it only at the government store or other legally authorized monopoly.

¹ OK, I use Google News like everyone else but the effect is entirely the same as it I had swept of the entire internet for new amazing tales of beer.

Angstity Beer Blogging

The good guys at Beer Advocate posted this…

First, we hate blogs as much as  this guy. (Actually … we hate blogs more.) That’s why this is not a blog.

…and then proceeded to announce their new blog…which isn’t a blog…yet works exactly like a blog. This is good and will likely be a great read and place to comment on thoughts from the Alström brothers about beer culture. But it is a blog.

The Furnace

Remortgaging the future on the bet of stability has meant owning a furnace again. There is a lot to be said for living in an apartment building big enough to warrant a super…not to mention a pool. We never seem to move from one sort of place to a similar one. Just as the move from a century old farmhouse on two-acres of onions and grass to a hundred plus unit mid-rise was a re-education, so too is moving into the 1960s suburban dreamscape. One friend who bought into the modern suburban dreamscape looked at our tree filled streets and yards the other day and was immediately ticked: “great, now I get to come over and think about how great our place will look in 2037.”

But every thing comes with a cost and that means we now have our own furnace to tend…and water heater and laundry and air and other things I really don’t understand yet. At least we don’t have a well and a septic system. Nothing feels better than cutting a cheque for $5,500 on a new poo treatment facility on your mini-farm. A poo eating machine. Because they are all machines and a house is just a stranded ship filled with machines.

Before the farm out east, we rented the upper story of an Ottawa Valley lumber barons whome from a couple of pals who lived on the main floor after dividing it into three apartments as an investment. We ended up with the two upstairs ones for a year and a half. Ten or more foot ceilings, two kitchens and more than eighty paces from the front door to the TV. That place was an ocean liner, two hulking metal boxes in the basement the size of mini-vans providing the heat. They needed tending…for if you didn’t anticipate the effect of impending shifts in the continental low and high pressure systems upon the inert thing that is a 30 by 50 by 100 foot, twenty room house of stone built for a rich dreamer in around 1890, you (and your thoughtful tenants upstairs) roasted or froze – depending on the whim of the season – usually for two days and usually at solstice but magnified during a quirky thaw, intense heatwave or summer coldsnap, as the furnaces were stroked and stoked, as the pipes creeked and coaxed hot water radiators to convey more or less energy into the mass of rock that encased our families, landlord and tenant in equal subjugation to the laws of thermal dynamics and Victoria home engineering. Men who knew not enough and knew they knew not enough worried over these machines at such times. Worried and drank beer in the basement, watching.

Apparently the new furnace, air cooling and water heating matrix in the new dark room down there is in good shape and has been well tended. I have some time.

Writing Myself Into A Blob

It has been a bit of a blur recently. Much of what I do at work boils down to reading, writing and editing. I get up and read and write – and sometimes edit – here. And recently I was asked to write two beer related bits, one 500 words and one 5000, which means I have been pretty much writing for a few weeks from getting up to going to bed. It is a very blobbifying gig. So I bought weights. The place we just left had a pool and that was grand. Swimming is the opposite of writing. It takes more effort than you feel like you are giving. You can dive under and contemplate for a few seconds what it would be like to be a fish. Writing does not give you that – with its incessant clatter and the need for others to receive the printed word. I suspect hoisting weights will not be like pretending to be a fish either.

Cyclops – Perhaps The Worst Idea Ever

Describing taste in words is funny business but making the effort is worthwhile as it provides you with a mechanism through which you can record your experiences with food and drink, and especially craft foods like real ale. We each take in the esters, phenols and other organic elements and recreate their interconnection in our own minds as we sip, sometimes discovering what the brewer intended and sometimes finding out new nuances never expected. Then you use your words to frame your experience. Do it often enough and you develop your own descriptors that make sense for your experience.

So it is inordinately shocking, then, to learn about what may be the worst idea in the craft beer movement I have ever heard of – a standardized system of beer description not unironically called Cyclops:

Cyclops, the new scheme launched today at the Great British Beer Festival at Earls Court in London, has the backing of 14 real ale breweries. Under the scheme, the brewers have agreed to follow a standardised template on all promotional material, describing the style, smell, look and taste of their beers. Bitterness and sweetness – the two main measures used to describe real ale’s characteristics – will also now be scored from one to five.

Cyclops follows a pilot scheme introduced by Leicester brewer Everards, which simplified the language used to describe real ales on promotional materials so customers knew exactly what to expect. A Campaign for Real Ale spokesman said: “Real ale is an incredibly complex drink with an enormous range of styles and tastes. Cyclops will demystify real ale so drinkers will know what a beer will look, smell and taste like before they part with their cash at the bar.”

This is tragic. And it is stunning that CAMRA supports such a thing. It is important at this moment in time that the most famous Cyclops, Homer’s Polyphemus, was blinded for life by drinking strong wine and ate people. This is hardly the making of a good brand. But even when he had one good eye he saw things…like he was born with one eye in the middle of his forehead – as in without particularly strong ability to see things from other perspectives. Plus, as man eating giant shepherds who get tricked a lot, they sort of fit the images of a rural rube caricature, kinda like in the satirical play by Euripides.¹

And that is sort of what the program takes the craft beer lover for in presuming to tell you how to taste – it takes you for an ignorant oaf. It will create one recommended way to look at things and a snobby attitude to those who find their own way. Reject such mecho-branding systematic standards that will homogenize response patterns and trust yourself. If you think a beer tastes like the armpit Polyphemus after a long night in the cave (if you know what I mean) while the brewer tells you something like “it is a 5 (bitter), 3 (waterhardness), 3 (maltiness), 2 (mouthfeel) and 4 (overall) pale ale” then you just trust yourself and know that is likely tastes like that armpit.

¹…which would have been funnier if, instead of saying he was called “No man” thus leading to lots of punning hi-jinks that confused the big old dope, Odysseus had actually called himself “Norman” which would have led to a lot less confusion and likely the eating of Odysseus in the first few scenes thus saving thousands of undergrads the misery of figuring the whole thing out.