Sic Semper Bastardes

Image framed and captured perfectly, easily,
with the Canon PowerShot Elph 110HS

Here lies not the mightiest of cameras, nor the most useful, nor the most helpful.

Here lies a camera so confounded, so hardwired for pure cussedness, that none shall mourn its passing save my enemies.

Behold it, ye, frozen in this perpetually obnoxious state: never willing to fully turn on, yet never able to fully retract.

It could take good pictures, if you had a tripod and five minutes, between the hours of 8 AM and 4 PM on a cloudless, sunny day. As a point-and-shoot it was a barely sufficient paperweight. It was known for missing crucial shots, for being unable to focus in macro mode, and for secretly slipping into macro mode.

After a short life of avoiding work, it lays down to rest now, never to arise.

Damned be you, Samsung PL210. Damned be your soul to hell.

Homebrew: Bourbon Dubbel - 04

Today was the second stage in my beer-making, and I was pretty excited about it! I even scrubbed down the bottle-capper.

I was very diligent in cleaning up all my gear. The plastic bucket would not hold enough water to wash and sterilize everything (there's a quarter-sized hole where the spigot goes) but I found a clever way around this: I stored it inside the large pot I boil my wort in. In this way I filled up three gallons of water and (after scrubbing down with soap and rinsing) let all my equipment soak in OneStep to really clean it before soaking it all in StarSan to sanitize it. I think this is the best prep job I've ever done.

Unfortunately, all the joy ended there. Racking from the carboy into the mixing bucket was unfavorable since I discovered, belatedly, my carboy cap is for a five-gallon model and I'm making one gallon. The cap for this jug is considerably smaller and my carboy cap was inapplicable. I racked it with simple tubing but sucked up a substantial amount of yeast from the bottom, despite my best efforts, and the beer that went into the bucket is cloudy as hell.

I tested the specific gravity of the beer: two weeks ago it was 1030 and today it was 1012. One of my colleagues suggested this puts it at around 2.3% ABV, which is depressing since it should've been 7%. I tasted it and it tasted like watery lager, not a hint of bourbon or oak in it. Regardless, I mixed in the maple syrup and bottled it into five bombers. In two weeks we'll see how bad of a disaster it is.

There aren't any pictures because my crappy-assed Samsung camera is broken and inoperable.

Next time I make a batch, I will let it sit in the primary fermenter for the full two weeks, rack it into a secondary container for eleven days and then place it in the fridge for three days. I'm told this will help the yeast settle and clarify the beer. I'm thinking about getting one of those attachments that go on the bottom of the racking wand, that guard it from touching bottom by an inch or two. Though what I saw tonight would contradict its efficacy: even one inch off the surface of the yeast, a tiny pale waterspout of yeast would rise up and stream into the hose, no matter how I moved it around. Perhaps there's no getting around that.

Homebrew: Bourbon Dubbel - 03

We're going places! I have added the quarter-pound of Bavarian candi sugar, the bourbon-soaked oak chips, and the 1/3-cup of bourbon. Luckily, there is still enough bourbon for me to drink.

Toki hasn't been in the kitchen for a long time, which is kinda crazy since right now the kitchen smells awesome. The bourbon, the oak, and the four grains that went into the malt all combine to make something really delicious. And I would be tempted to sample it right now except I have very good self-control and long-distance imaging, or whatever they call it. Delayed gratification. I know that the beer I'm going to make is going to be better than the freakin' awesome brew sitting on the stove right behind me right now, so I'm not going to ladle a sample into a little IKEA tumbler, let it cool, and... no, I won't even think about it.

I'm just going to have some bourbon. That's good enough for now. And maybe I'll walk up to Sebastian Joe's for some ice cream, if there's some stage in this process that will let me step out for a few minutes. But I'm terrible at reading ahead (see also sparging) and it might be important for me to always be around at all times until it's sitting in the carboy, in my closet.

It's interesting because the Brooklyn BrewShop's instructions don't mention a wort chiller at all: they actually suggest filling up your sink with "five inches of water and ice cubes." Isn't that quaint! Seriously, this is totally written by two people living in a little apartment! An apartment a lot like mine, I imagine, a little... I think this is a kitchenette and not a galley kitchen, but what do I know? It's a small kitchen, I think mine is like that of the authors', and I've totally got a sink full of cold water and ice cubes waiting for the hopped malt, sugar, and drunken oak chips. I would've done this in the bathtub, since I did it before and it worked out most handily, but I'll take these authors at face value and follow their disarmingly specific instructions. I mean, they've published a book and I haven't. I'm going to take the authorities' lead, and I don't think the philosophers will fault me for this.

Ugh! It's supposed to chill for 30 minutes, and this would totally be a great moment to run out for ice cream, but I just read ahead (contrary to my nature) and apparently there's some equipment I should be cleaning and sterilizing right now. Excuse me, I have to go wash a carboy, a funnel, some tubing, and evidently my own hands for the next step.

I was about to say, Boy, this beer better be worth it, but I totally know it will be.

Crap, the ice cubes have already melted! We're not even ten minutes into this! I can't make new ice cubes in so short a time! Guess I have to deviate from the printed word and do this bidness in my 'tub.

I prefer StarSan as a biodegradable, environmentally friendly sanitizer that does the job so well, even the pros recommend it. OneStep is great for cleansing, but you must remember that's what it's for, and cleansing is not the same as sanitizing. And as it turns out, I have sanitized a bunch of equipment I don't need right yet. In fact, I have transferred everything from the 5 gal. carboy into a 1 gal. carboy, which was a tedious and stupid process, but I'm not making that much beer so it was necessary to do. Especially since the book has specified a complicated process in which I allow the pitched wort to "off-gas" for three days, a stoppered tube running into a bowl of sanitizing fluid (why?) before swapping it out for the conventional airlock. I guess I'll go along with it, but I really wish the stupid book would explain why this was necessary.

On the other hand, I'm one step closer to my ice cream.

Homebrew: Bourbon Dubbel - 02

Have to maintain the temperature for an hour, keeping it between 144-152°. I went over a little bit but I left the lid off and cut the heat, so I hope it doesn't damage anything.

I'm going to say that a lot! I just get very insecure during this process. I want everything to go right, and beer can be pretty forgiving at some stages (like boiling the wort) and not at others (everything else). I'm not very skilled and I'm confronted with that all the time: while I was tediously adding and deducting hundredths of pounds on digital scales, cautiously searching all the bins for the various malts I needed, some old guy came in with a mixed expression of determination and tired intolerance. I was dinking around with fractions and he just strode right up, got a large plastic bin, threw pounds and pounds of various malts into a few bags, and strode out again. He's an expert, he's been doing this often enough that he knows what he needs, what can be overlooked, and where his margins of error are. Not so with me: I've got to study and stare and scrutinize to make sure every last tidbit is followed, and somewhere along the way I can hope to intuit the process, to internalize the formulas so that I have a relationship with the chemical process rather than following it blindly and methodically like an aspirant to a dead religion.

See, even now, I should be boiling the wort back up to 170° with a companion gallon of water as well, but I forgot about the galon and it's heating up now while I've cut the heat on the steeping malts. I'm so terrible. I believe in drinking my failures, sure, but it's not as good as drinking a success, and I'll leave the astute reader to guess at which I'm aiming.

Anyway, another step down and another step screwed up! I was supposed to sparge the grains over a large pot, which I found after ten minutes of searching, and then dump a boiling gallon of water through the malt grains. Instead, I got rid of the grains and had to salvage them (or as many as practical/hygenic) to dump the water through them. Do I have enough malted water left over? Good lord, am I making my own malt? That would make sense! Wow, this is the missing step in homebrewing that I was dreading: when the grid goes down, sure, I could grow my own hops and maybe find malt and barley, but how would I make the malt syrup? Apparently I'm doing it right now! That just now occurred to me!

Time for more bourbon.

Anyway, the malted liquid is boiling nicely and it's time to add some of the hops (this 1/5-reduced recipe is increasingly annoying: I have to waste many ingredients because I have more than is called for, in a one-gallon batch, but that's how we learn). And in the above left photo, please note my curious little kitty, Toki. He likes the smell of malt, apparently, though he won't actually eat a sample of the boiled grains.

Homebrew: Bourbon Dubbel - 01

Courtesy of the excellent Brooklyn BrewShop's Beer Making Book, I'm following a recipe to create what's called a "bourbon dubbel." The recipe they describe is mellower than regular bourbon-based beers, but I won't hold that against it. It might even be an advanced experiment and I might be underqualified, but in many ways I've let go of my ego and am willing, even eager, to make mistakes, thereby to learn.

What I like about homebrewing is what I like about stationery, absinthe, or smoking pipes: the ritual. I take it very seriously, perhaps to a degree others would find ridiculous. To prepare the kitchen I chased the cats out, put away the dishes, washed the counters and scrubbed the floor (my wife doesn't mind this at all).

The first thing to do was to soak some dark oak chips in bourbon overnight. Easily enough done: I'd recently picked up a lovely bottle of Woodford Reserve, so I let the French oak chips drink that up all night long. Apparently it doesn't matter whether you use chips, cubes, or spiral discs: these are all for wine but can be used for beer, and it's not a question of mass or surface area. I went with the chips anyway.

I picked up all the malts at Northern Brewer yesterday, but I was so excited to be gathering my own ingredients that I totally forgot to get the grains crushed there in the store. I've crushed my own grains before: I use a wooden mallet that I roll back and forth, with considerable force, over a plastic bag filled with small portions of the grains. Is it sufficient? I hope so, but when I poured it all into the stock pot of 160° water, some and maybe a lot of them looked perfectly intact. Just like with my last project, I hope this isn't as bad as I dread, and I hope it doesn't ruin the batch.

Pinterest 5: the Clone Invasion

Predictably, the Pinterest clones have begun emerging:

• Clipix, the life-organizer with a private option
• Fa Xian, China's version built by Alibaba
• Dart It Up, the male-oriented alternative
• Snatchly, for sharing favorite porn images

You can tell you have a good idea when other, lesser "entrepreneurs" spend all their creative effort on imitating you.

Myself, I started early with Pinterest but left after a few weeks when a certain legal issue arose with their Terms of Service, namely: 1) Pinterest willfully assumes images you link to are your property, 2) Pinterest gives itself the right to sell your images without your acknowledgment, and 3) if the original artist/photographer presses a lawsuit, Pinterest holds itself blameless and forwards all the trouble directly to you. Despite this, and even confronted with this, people cling to ignorance-as-defense: "I thought it was like a bulletin board or a bookmarks list. I don't see anything wrong with that."

[UPDATE: April 1, 2012 - Pinterest intends to revise its Terms of Service, in effect: 1) only discouraging blatant self-promotion, with a function to report copyright violation, and 2) removing its clause about selling images users post. These changes will go into effect April 6, 2012. The inadvertent comedy behind this is that Pinterest insists it's trying to disable exploitation of its service as free advertising, while mainstream media is full of how-to articles for individuals, organizations (Army, White House), and corporations to use Pinterest for exactly this end.]

Dart It Up: toys, cars, sports, and misogyny.

Clipix sounds like what I was using Pinterest for, anyway: a folder for stuff I wanted to keep track of. I started following people who had links to really interesting jackets and clothes, so one folder was like a shopping list for that time in the future when I'll have discretionary funds. I will miss it for that: someone had access to these amazing Asian distributors I never would've heard of on my own.

The only difference between Dart It Up and Snatchly is that the former will also include sports, cars, gadgets, and firearms (or the latter lacks those). Snatchly will feature out-and-out nudity, while Dart It Up posts only show bikinis and... I don't get why anyone finds the Olson Twins attractive, when every picture makes them look like they were dug out of rubble after a week of rescue attempts. Maybe these guys get off on tragedy. Each of these services, ultimately, will succeed by reinforcing negative male stereotypes, a trend men don't fight very hard against. The lesson here: cynicism is profitable.

Dart It Up's mission statement is that it is a reaction to Pinterest's trending: manly-men didn't feel secure about posting their interests (man-cave accouterments, soft-core porn, &c.) in a gallery of women's interests: dresses, fingernail designs, hairstyles, dresses, shoes, make-up, accessories, and more dresses. Which is strange, because you can make your posts private or share them with friends. Why would someone be ashamed to post their interests unless they acknowledge they are shameful? What Dart It Up provides, then, is permission to be an asshole, just as Pinterest reinforces women being materialistic, shallow girly-girls: in fact, they're starting to address their problem with the pro-anorexia/bulimia movement known, among other facades, as "Thinspiration."

So clearly Pinterest answered a need. I don't think it created a need, I think it presented an elegant solution to something people wanted to do, something that had been touched on by other social media. People want to group these things and they want to show off their prizes. Is that a hunting instinct? A sense of accomplishment, in a surplus society where priorities have shifted from things you do to things you own?

"Flash Mob" Assaults on Cyclists in Minneapolis

In February and March there have been six incidents of a group of "young men" who emerge in force to attack Minneapolitans on bicycles. Police have noted these assaults do not seem to be motivated by theft: they are simply attacking cyclists for the sake of violence.

• City Pages article
• St. Patrick's Day beating
• Patio riot, witnessed by police
• Flash mob assault (video)
• StarTrib article on assault

Cyclists: be on alert for any large group of "young men" emerging from a bus shelter along Nicollet Mall. These attacks have occurred as early as 8 PM, and at least one developed right in front of police.