:TESTO: test test test... :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I've got myself a domain name, and so I'll use it to continue my ramblings on matters poetical, educational, edible and fermentable.

I think I'll be more inclined to post to and maintain this new blog, as I'm running it on my own machine, with all the bells and whistles and gears and cogs and little lights that go bing! at my fingertips.

http://blog.doctorhrothgar.net/ :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:"The sky's the limit."

The robotics competition in which my students are engaged is supported by NASA, and their engineers and spokespeople have been saying that to us about themselves for months. I truly hope they do not realize what they say. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I saw the new Beowulf flick the other day, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a goofy action movie sometimes, and some of the bit parts are poorly animated, but overall it's a delightful treatment of the Beowulf story.

Most of the reviews I've read and most of the responses I've heard from friends and passerby are self-righteously scornful of the "changes in the story" that make this movie different from the thousand-year-old text. In particular, everybody seems to be acutely aware that Grendel's Mother doesn't quite look or act like a hideous sea troll, and claim this as cause to pooh-pooh a plot that neatly ties together the rather disjointed and rambling "original" tale.

So, yes. Neil Gaiman and Bob Zemeckis aren't just retelling Beowulf, they're playing with it. It's gained a layer of shiny plastic, it's been pared and interlinked and slightly warped, and it's still recognizably Beowulf. It's clear that if the events presented were remembered in song and written down by a monk, they'd look a lot like the text that so many high school students have read the Cliff Notes for.

I rather think that any screenwriter worth his salt would find it tedious and painful to represent even the core three-monsters line of the Beowulf text faithfully as a film, and the producers would be hard-pressed to find an audience that would accept it as entertainment.

And if dropping a hot chick into a subterranean lake gets more folk out to hear a song as old as our tongue, I won't be miffed.


My own nitpicks and glories (small spoilers may be present):




Although it's historically flawed to have the Monster Family and Old Beowulf's Bard speaking Anglo-Saxon (PIE and Old Norse would be the correct choices, respectively), it's thematically appropriate and awesome - the bard's lines are straight from the text, and Crispin Glover delivers his tortured words in teachable form. Both his and Jolie's lines are thick with cognates, so an audience of moderately quick ear can pick up both meaning and structure from their dialogue. I winced a bit at Angelina's all-too-modern pronunciation of those words as old as sharks, but accuracy must give way to audience acceptance. I'll consider Jolie a gateway drug - may her flashy flesh and the time-warped words from her luscious lips gain a few more seats in Anglo-Saxon Studies courses worldwide.

I rather wish the film had mentioned Scyld, founder of Hrothgar's line. Lineage is such an important part of the root text, and the movie's plot itself. Just a casual name-drop would have been enough, but I could totally get behind a flashback scene, perhaps implicating Scyld in the same curse as befell the story's two kings.

The little links that Gaiman wove between the parts of the story were sometimes artful -- putting the big and obvious plot-twisting addition aside, Unferth, his slave, and the Horn provided a nice bit of continuity between the Act Grendel and Act Dragon. Unferth the Christian was also most appropriate.

And I still need to see it in 3D. Having seen the movie in a measly two dimensions makes it clear to me that it was built for a species with binocular vision. The majority of the animation, especially for facial close-ups, is top notch - believable, expressive, and shiny. I owe it to myself and the artists to view it in fulness.

Wyrd bith ful ared. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I forgot to link to the Snö application yesterday, so here it is. And here's the source.

Also, I just got back from dinner at the same restaurant where Bill Richardson was holding a campaign shindig. We were the only people there who weren't there to see Bill, and it felt a little odd - almost like trespassing - to sitting there on the edge of the hobnobbing. We only saw the man himself on his way out, which took a while as he was buffeted between photo-seeking suits. He seems nice.

The food was quite good, too. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Today was election day, which in Baltimore City means the schools are closed! I spent the day a-puttering. Firstly, I kicked some of the rust off of the Mac OS X application "Snow Desktop", also called "Snö" (I had previously modified it so that the flakes would collect atop windows, and so the rate of snowfall would be tined to network bandwidth, and added the ability for the flakes' color scheme to adjust chameleon-like to your desktop background). My modified Snö hadn't worked with Leopard, and now it does, and has a few minor tweaks and whistles in tow. The color-matching now correctly samples the entire image, and flakes can be set to fall *behind* desktop icons and in front of the desktop background. Many of my earlier modifications to the Cocoa were hackish and blunt, I might like to go back and clean it up later (especially the part that loads image-packs. On the upside, there are now nice Autumnal Leaves. And pretty flowers.) I also started what I hope will be a nice cranberry mead, with about three dry quarts of fresh cranberries and 8 oz of cranberry concentrate. There's a handful of ginger and a healthy dose of cardamom, and half an ounce of dried sweet orange peel. The honey was free (maybe 1.5 gal of 22% water honey), to boot. I think I might call it "Mad Doctor Hrothgar Can't Fit Down the Chimney," but I'm not sure it'll be ready in time. Perhaps "Mad Doctor Hrothgar Prevents Urinary Infections"? That's a nice, timeless name... :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:
I bottled the buckwheat-heather Hart (or "Heorot," for the vikings in the house) brew last night, and I think it's my best yet. It's got the dark robustness of  Thunder (my early buckwheat), without its harsh edge or cloudiness, and has the smooth full-mouth texture of the well-aged Midnight Mead (my first brew ever, and the only other I've done with heather). It's delightfully drinkable, and produces a more subtle (complex?) buzz than your standard beer-and-wine fare. I can't imagine how fantastic it'll be when aged a few months.

I've also decided that since I won't be getting to Mars anytime soon, I'm going to go to Antarctica, either next year or the year after. The recruitment season appears to be Jan-May, and working through the contractor Raytheon appears to be the only way to get down there, short of being a scientist. Pfft.

Looking at this year's openings, there are a few places I might fit in. Positions are advertised for  help-desk lead and network engineer, although the second is slightly beyond my current expertise, it remains a possibility. I'm given to understand that positions for galley slaves and housekeeping and generalist support staff are also somewhat common, although draw a larger applicant pool. There's also a steady need for carpenters and suchlike, I could see myself spending a summer or two apprenticing at some practical trade to build up the necessary experience for those positions... that's more of a stretch. But I think I might do just about anything to spend a season on an alien continent.

Am I serious? Quite probably. My plan is to keep on doing things on the other landmasses, but to keep applying at every chance for Antarctic work, always staying flexible enough to pack up and hit the ice should the opportunity strike.

Why? Nobody I know has ever been there. It's a world in a bubble, it's Mars, it's a science fiction story. It's an adventure that would be just mine, and it's a frosty kick in the pants to get me back into the weird (wyrd?) before I risk becoming a career anything. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Assembling the BILLY corner bookcase without instructions is like solving a puzzle in Myst - you start by observing the scene, gaining an intuition for the form and function of each piece, and how they might work together. Many of them connect using methods you've encountered while completing other tasks, although sometimes they're put to a novel application. Understanding the mechanism isn't the end of the challenge, of course -- the correct approach and timing must be determined, often by experiment, by interacting with the scene and seeing what happens. You may not succeed the first few times, and you have to start the job over nearly from scratch. Finally, there comes a moment where you suddenly *see* the engineer's masterful plan, the elegant combination of unwieldy factors, you smack your head knowingly and put the pieces together. After which you realize you had undone an early step, and have to start over yet again, but this time with understanding and an appreciation for artful design.

Then the finished piece rises majestically into place, fitting snugly into its corner of the world. You reach out your hand and take a book from the shelf... :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I tried to stop the Comcast guy from running their foolish installer, but because Comcast is stupid, ass-backwards, and inefficient, I had to call the Comcast office to arrange for payment for the installation, and he ran the installer before I could clarify my "I don't think you'll need to run the installer" statement more vociferously.

That said, I'm somewhat glad that the installer failed to detect any of my installed web browsers, and so instead installed its own copy of Internet Frickin' Explorer 5.2, and loaded it (and it alone, as far as I can tell) with useless bookmarks.

It's gone now, but none the less, ick. It seems that when IE ran it also shat all over com.apple.internetconfig.plist, but it remains to be seen whether this will affect anything important.

Back to the kitchen, now. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:

Poison oak is a widespread deciduous shrub throughout mountains and valleys of California, generally below 5,000 feet elevation. In shady canyons and riparian habitats it commonly grows as a climbing vine with aerial (adventitious) roots that adhere to the trunks of oaks and sycamores. Poison oak also forms dense thickets in chaparral and coastal sage scrub, particularly in central and northern California.
(from http://waynesword.palomar.edu/ww0802.htm)

It was a lovely hike, in any case. Now, it's Tecnu time.

:ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:It's been a lovely afternoon in San Francisco - I oriented myself utilizing a hill-climbing approach to find a local maximum from which I could not detect other higher maxima. This ended me atop a hill in LaFayette Park, with a nice view of Alcatraz and surprisingly thick WiFi coverage.
The trees here seem lighter, perhaps more bouyant than the ones in the real world. Perhaps they're made of paper? Some of them are spiky.

It's definitely a Thursday night in the hostel - most folks have been staying for longer than I will be staying, so every night is not an adventure for them anymore. Most folks are in their own mini-worlds. Some girls are making sweet potato latkes in the kitchen, the Brazilian sitting next to me is cruising MySpace and YouTube (her Vista TCP/IP stack recently reset by me). The Brits are playing cards, the couples who haven't gone to bed are planning their tours for tomorrow, or eating a sandwich. I'm writing a web log entry.

In Baltimore, it's 1:20 AM Friday, but it's only 10:20 PM Thursday here. I feel like I shouldn't be ready to turn in and shut down, but I certainly am. My room is just off the common space, though, so while things aren't exactly jumping out here, I know my sleep would not be uninterrupted.

I'm rambling too much. I should stop, and talk more to the Brazilian. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/forecast/MapClick.php?site=mtr&smap=1&textField1=37.775&textField2=-122.41833

The climatological monotony might drive me into a hip and easygoing stupor. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Here's an overview of my summer. It's beginning to look a lot like crazy, everywhen you go. I'm looking forward to it, especially the super-compressed move in mid-July.

June 28-July 1: Totally Awesome Liz and Nat's Wedding in Toledo, Super Fun Crashing-Erik's-House Party in Ann Arbor.

July 2-July 4: Begin to Move. I signed my lease today!

July 5-July 15: A few rather unplanned (and therefore full of adventurey possibility, and as such wicked sweet) days in San Francisco surrounding a week of rather intense training with Oracle to teach Database Programming to high schoolers, which I'll probably never do but it gets me to San Francisco for free, and provides some mental hard-tack this summer. This span will include visits to Benny and Chris, and possibly Nick Arioli, who I understand is something of a hotshot manager at Friendster. I may help Chief Engineer Scott invent plexiglass while I'm in town. or at least chuckle genially at his use of 20th-century computer technology.

July 16-July 18: Finish Moving. I need to buy two more A/C window units, as the old tenant is taking hers with her. (and her microwave, and her spice rack... we'll see how I can get by without those things. The third floor will definitely need air conditioning, being a third floor.)

July 19-July 23: Regional Burning-Man Event in Ashville, NC, with sister and my new brother-in-law, and his older son. Gonna take some mead to insert into the gift economy, if the darned stuff ever finishes fermenting.

-a short pause, to breathe, and unpack. probably a house-opening dinner party, with pie-

August 6 - 10: Cisco Academy Curriculum Update Training - I actually have a good time at these all-day intensive trainings, as the leaders are intelligent and well-versed professionals, experts in both teaching and content. Not your normal Professional Development bullshit.

--visit Rafe in Maine? pick fresh blueberries and make maple wine?--

August  21-22: Bonus Professional Development at Digital Harbor. This may be your normal PD bullshit, I hope it's not.

August 23-FOREVER: Getting ready to teach, then teaching. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:A few weeks ago, I started a gallon of molasses ale, with roughly equal parts blackstrap molasses and brown sugar, along with some juniper berries. I tasted it a week ago, and it was too syrupy-fruity, so I added a little water steeped with half an ounce of hops.

Fermentation has slowed, and as I want some amount of bubbly for this beerish brew, I went ahead and bottled it before it fully halted. The intent is to drink it soon (before I leave for SF), so it doesn't have a chance to build up pressure, and I suspect that ale does not age in as dignified a manner as mead and wine.

My own definitions of beer, wine, and ale are very loose, and don't consider the sugar source in the typing. It might be more accurate to call this "vesou" or "grappe", which is the fermented, undistilled forerunner to rum. But I think it's nicer to give a loose term that allows a frame of reference for the flavor and alcohol content of the brew, and this one is "ale", in my head, namely a higher-octane, full-flavored beerish sort of thing.

I also baked a cherry pie this morning, having clambered out my bathroom window to pick cherries from the tree in my very backyard, as the boughs hung ripely above the kitchen's nice flat roof. I'm rather excited to share it with people who will eat it, which is in the works as well. I'm making calzoni for dinner, and have invited a few friends over. It has been such a long while since I cooked a big meal for several people.

Also, I've found a place to rent, for a ridiculously good price. Three somewhat narrow stories, for $650 a month, not four blocks from where I live now. Horray for me! I'll have to throw another dinner party once I move.

Away, to make the calzone-dough! :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I am so very glad to have found my pants, my wits, and the universe.
Luckily, they were all in the same place. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:It's been a long, long time since I've written here, and my life has been correspondingly busy. It still is, but I'll take a moment to reflect upon its high points, in no particular order:

I just finished watching Jurassic Park III, having decided to grab it and its predecessor after reading about feathery velociraptors somewhere or another. The second member of the trilogy thoroughly disappointed, but this third item was its own movie, thrilling to the stillborn paleontologist in my soul. With the exception of a bit of rubber-nosed live-action spinosaur foolery near the beginning, the dinosaurs were convincingly nimble and massive, a definite improvement over the original film's state of the art. Pterosaurs especially earned my regard, and the rethought 'raptors were nicely presented.

But life isn't all movies and popcorn alone in my room, and thank goodness. This last weekend I launched on a whimsical tour of Boston-town, in the company of a fellow teacher and his housemate, both remarkable people and solid traveling companions. I saw Kayle and Kest and John Walton and Blaise, I went to a concert upon the Esplanade and ate good free food, I walked in the footsteps of freedom and climbed an obelisk. I shared my mead at a barbecue, and ate grill-roasted corn. I even made pancakes and sang Billy Joel, and quite nearly (but not quite) did the latter in a karaoke setting. It was a fine weekend, with unparalleled fairness of weather and friends.

And the school-year is wrapping up, my seniors graduate Sunday. I must be back in the city from my sister's wedding (halfway up the path of my most recent journey) in speedy time to take part in such. I continue to contra-dance weekly, and Tree of Life now bubbles happily alongside the slow-fermenting Water From India. The former features a number of seeds and roots of the licorice flavor-cluster, along with caraway seeds and a hint of dill (it thus imitates the Norse distilled concoction called akvavit, which is more like vodka and less like honey, but the spirit is the same, even if the spirits are missing).

Leaping ahead further, I shall let my lease expire at the end of July, because They are building a parking garage across the street from me, and I have absolutely no intent of living next to a construction zone. Further, I intend to try living alone, and as my current housemates are following their predecessor's model and moving out (although not in the middle of their lease, for a nifty change of pace), I decided I was tired of being the rock left to gather new flotsam to my sides for another season. Today marked the first inquiries into new housing, I'm thinking of either moving a very small amount east or west, or up into the monumenty heart of the city. The latter would represent a big change, and I'm not sure I'm ready or wanting to be surrounded on all sides by tall things that are not brachiosaurs or sequoias.

I shall also go to Toledo and Ann Arbor and San Francisco and Black Mountain this summer. Some of those might have brachiosaurs.

We shall see. It is time for bed.

Dancing, tomorrow. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:So I've had a great few weeks of late, visiting my sister in Charlottesville to celebrate my birthday and to play the role of Midnight Bunny for my niece-and-nephews' Easter, then to Oberlin, two weekends in a row, for old-friend visits and a truly remarkable quantity of contra dancing. And robots, and mad science, both on stage. Which brings me to a caveat about homebrewing...

Don't hand-cork bottles that you've primed for carbonation. Your furniture will thank you, and so will the window opposite your wine rack. All three primed bottles of Timberwine have gushed enthusiastically in the last week and a half - the first was happily sealed with a mighty gasket-clamp, and so only erupted upon opening. The latter two did make the floor sticky without human intervention (a fitting resonance with the ending theme of the recently-witnessed production of R.U.R...), and although the window was safely protected behind hyperbole, my dining room now smells refreshingly of pine trees and maple syrup. And ethanol.

This is a shame, as there exist very few bottles of Timberwine - I think I'm down to two half-liters, and for all I know Rafe may have already drowned in a foamy sea of fermented tree-sap. The remaining bottles (fitted with the stronger seal) will be cherished, and saved for a particularly rainy day. Then I shall make another maple brew, and dedicate it to the wine that was lost. (As I drink the dregs of bottle #2, I note the cinnamon flavor has matured nicely, and the pineyness has been subdued. The next maple fermentation shall be even better!)

On the upside, the Water From India is doing very well, fermenting for a long long time but looking clear and tasting deliciously gingery. I do not think I will prime the WFI bottles.

Go now to sleep, and if you see a new star in the early morning sky, know it is my cork. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Yesterday I walked uphill for about 3 miles to a contra dance in a packed church hall. Good band, good dancing, plenty of age variety. I'm going to head down to Friday's contra outside of DC with someone I met there, there's a fair bit of overlap between the two crowds. Rafe and Bradley surprised me by dropping in for a part of the dance, and then vanished in a puff of folksiness.

The label for the experimental brew that must not be named (I figure I'll try it this weekend):

I might make various connections between the interweaving structured madness of contra dancing and Lovecraftian gods, but I'm going to go have a drink with the housemates. And seafood. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I don't know where I first came across this notion, but it's tickled me ever since. An acappella group could have a blast with this - go join one and make them sing it. The tunes line up fairly neatly, and the interleaving allows for humorous connections between adjacent verses.

//to the tune of Amazing Grace
Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale,
a tale of a fateful trip.
That started from this tropic port,
aboard this tiny ship.

/*to the Gilligan's Island theme*/
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me....
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now, I see, blind, but now, I see.

//to the tune of Amazing Grace
The mate was a mighty sailin' man,
the skipper brave and sure.
Five passengers set sail that day,
for a three hour tour...

/*to the Gilligan's Island theme*/
T'was Grace that taught...
my heart to fear.
And Grace, my fears relieved.
How precious did that Grace appear...
the hour I first believed.

//to the tune of Amazing Grace
The weather started getting rough,
the tiny ship was tossed.
If not for the courage of the fearless crew,
the Minnow would be lost;

/*to the Gilligan's Island theme*/
Through many dangers, toils and snares...
we have already come.
T'was Grace that brought us safe thus far...
and Grace will lead us home.

//to the tune of Amazing Grace
The ship took ground on the shore of this
uncharted desert isle,

//restart the tune?
with Gilligan, the Skipper too,
the Millionaire, and his Wife,

the Movie Star, and the rest
here on Gilligan's Isle.

/*to the Gilligan's Island theme*/
The Lord has promised good to me...
His word my hope secures.
He will my shield and portion be...
as long as life endures.

//to the tune of Amazing Grace
So this is the tale of our castaways,
they're here for a long, long time.
They'll have to make the best of things,
it's an uphill climb.

/*to the Gilligan's Island theme*/
When we've been here ten thousand years...
bright shining as the sun.
We've no less days to sing God's praise...
then when we've first begun.

//to the tune of Amazing Grace
So join us here each week my friend,
you're sure to get a smile.
From seven stranded Castaways,
Here on Gilligan's Isle.
 
/*to the Gilligan's Island theme*/
"Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,   
That saved a wretch like me....
I once was lost but now am found,
Here on Gilligan's Isle!
(end) :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Rafe came through the other day, we drank and bottled the Timberwine that we had brewed together in January. It's nice, with a maple start and a piney finish (the cinnamon and cloves seem lost to me, among the trees), less alcoholic than my previous brews (due to a lesser initial sugar-density - our estimate is 9-10 percent alcohol by volume).

Rafe and I each ended up with nine bottles from the batch, three wine-sized and six half-liter.

My current mead-stock is somewhere near 36 bottles, ranging from in volume from 0.5 to 1 liter, spanning every batch I've ever bottled (five so far, and Water From India on the way). Even after I handle the holiday backlog, I'll still possess a respectable volume - so don't be shy about asking for a bottle all of your own.


And today I decided to try a small experiment:

• 4 cups water
• 3/4 cup molasses
• less than 1/4 cup sugar
• ~1.5 tsp powdered ginger
• two dashes cayenne pepper
• leftover champagne yeast

I wanted to experiment with the flavor of molasses in a meadlike brew, and decided only recently that I'd also like to produce a lower-alcohol, more-quickly-fermented drink. So I'll either add more water and ferment it in a larger container, or anticipate a sweeter, bubblier product than most ales. The latter suits me more, especially because I've found the intended flavor of many recent batches to be too subdued - if I like fermented molasses, I'll adjust timing and quantities on the next batch.

In honor of the anniversary of HP Lovecraft's death, I shall not name this blasphemous concoction, this dark and nascent spirit that rises even now from the squamous effluence of that strange fungus which dwells and feasts among the sweet black ichor carried here upon some nameless vessel from a steaming, alien shore.

But that won't stop me from drawing a label for it. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:The blackberry & black cherry melomel (which is the word for a honey-and-fruit fermentation) that I've been calling Bee Seasoning has been bottled, and I think I may change its name.

"Heliotrope" strikes me as an entirely appropriate name, combining connotations of delightful blossoms, shades of purple, solar-powered autonomous vegetable ambulation, and geographic survey equipment, and with a short linguistic hop also connotes a strange blend between heterotrophism and phototrophism, just like the long-intended image for the label:



The lettering also suggests "honey" to me, with its initial "h" and round vowels. That may just be me, but I'll count it as a plus.

So Heliotrope is in its twenty bottles. If I still owe you a wintertime mead-gift, I've got the goods to deliver now.

This particular mead has been a long time in coming - I brewed it Mid-December, and found it to taste rather poorly of cheap wine, six weeks later - harshly alcoholic, quite pleasant. So I added another gallon of stuff, water and sugar and black cherry juice in carefully improvised proportions, and it has since matured nicely to the point where I felt confident in bottling it. It's quite different from the other five meads I've made (by virtue of the fruit, and the double fermentation cycle), and I'm excited by it -- I look forward to measuring its reception by others. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO: :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:In case anyone actually wants to print the silly game-adaptation from the previous post, a fashionable and somewhat opaque card-back pattern may be desired.

If any of you have commentary/critique on the design, topology, room/weapon names, or even gameplay, I'd love to hear it. I haven't had a chance* to play the game myself.

*(Nat and Liz and Jo and Nathan, I'm passively talking directly to you!) :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I've taken Kill Doctor Lucky, Everybody's Favorite Pre-Clue Mystery Board Game, and made a new house map and set of murder implements appropriate to Mad Science's favorite spokesviking. The game's balance (topologically and card-potently), should be fairly close, but not identical. The number of connections between rooms, the distribution of room-weapon points, all fair matches to the original. I look forward to playtest.

So the next time you need a board game for a stormy night... give Kill Doctor Hrothgar (PDF) a go. You'll probably want cardstock or such for the cards at least, as they'll be flimsy and somewhat transparent otherwise.

While I've included a synopsis of the rules on the game-board, it may be useful to refer to the original rules. I had hoped they were freely available on the Internet, it appears they're not. I may scan and post them later, if I decide that Cheapass Games wouldn't mind.

Enjoy! :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Mead Made Complicated is a good site for me, and probably for those of the mead-curious inclined toward numbers and science. Although I tend to be fast and loose in my actual mead-making (beer is brewed, mead is made*), I find it very useful to have a bio-chemical appreciation/intuition for that which happens in the shadow of my kitchen, and to have a numerical baseline from which to deviate wildly.

The site's mascot is also a totally sweet** rendition of the Mad Viking Scientist, of whom our own good Doctor Hrothgar is but one facet.

The results of today's idle mead-research (which took me to the above-linked site):

I may want to try other yeast-strains, or even another species. I've been using Champagne yeast, which is highly alcohol-tolerant and produces very dry drinks. I think I might like something that stops fermenting (by its own choice) a bit sooner, allowing products that are not quite so high-test, and perhaps slightly sweet.

I've been using tea recently (and blackberries and cherry juice, in the instance of Bee Seasoning) to add tannin, at the stage of heating the honey and steeping spices. I think I might try aging some future mead in oak chips or acorns instead. I quite like the notion of a mead with an oaky twist.

Aging: I want more carboys. As it is, I've got three, each fermenting happily. It's about time to rack one of them, perhaps two (to remove the mead and its yeast from the hulls of the departed fungi), and I don't want to bottle them until fermentation has completely stopped. So I'll siphon it into the 7.5-gallon stock pot, wash the carboy, and siphon it back in, but I still can't begin a new batch until I've bottled one of them. I've got signs with Ents on them reminding me to be patient, but it's so much more fun to be actively creating.

I also want more wine bottles. While I have about a dozen liter and half-liter bottles with lovely reusable gasket-caps, I foresee that they won't quite contain the 13 gallons I've got on deck. So if you happen to be one of the fortunate few of my friends to dwell near me, and you drink wine from pleasantly shaped bottles, save them for me, and a month from now I'll give one back to you, with value added.

It's been ten months since I bottled my first batch (Mad Doctor Hrothgar's Midnight Mead), and almost exactly a year since the wort was brewed. I've got one bottle left of that batch, having been saved for "a special occasion". If nobody shows up to share that special bottle with me before my birthday (one year to the date of bottling), I shall drink it then -- six months is often quoted as the low end of quality aging.

Ideally, I'll find myself in a new and fantastic relationship with someone who would appreciate finely-aged mead. But then, that won't happen on its own. Perhaps this deadline will encourage me to be more sociable - I did have a blast at the roller-rink (!) for my housemate's own 25th birthday party, with her peer-aged friends, but not so much at the bar after - smoky and crowded. I must actively select for higher-valued contexts.

...in the past seven days, I've spent about 2.8 days' worth at school, including 3 hours on Saturday. Slide a day forward (President's day), and I'll have spent just 1.8 days of the week in the classroom. The break has done me worlds of good, sleepwise and mindwise. Hence such bigger-than-the-workday thoughts as those of the last paragraph, which I really haven't taken the time for in the past month. I need to spend more time doing interesting things away from work, both alone and in good company.

So I will. Do your part, come visit me -- or let me know if you want company (or an adventure), you just might get it.***


*wine isn't wound, or even wrought, but it would be, were I the wine-wright.

**it could also be dry, depending on the yeast used and the initial specific gravity of the must.

(!) I hadn't skated in a dozen years, nor had I skated much even then. I was quite pleased to discover the technique, through observation and experiment. Skating is a vitalizing challenge for both the body and the wit!

***Spring Break is the second week of April, a fine time for this pedagogue to be itinerant.
:ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:The wonderful thing about pigeons
Is pigeons are wonderful things
Their tops are covered with feathers
Their sides can fold out like wings

They're happy, happy
flappy, flappy
fun fun fun fun fun!

AND the most wonderful
thing about pigeons
is that I just ate one!
O yes, I just ate one!

...

Pigeons are sources of protein
They'll put color back in your cheek
There's lots of good meat on the drumsticks
The crunchy part is the beak


They're munchy, crunchy
crunchy, munchy
yum yum yum yum yum!

AND the most wonderful
thing about pigeons
Is that I just ate one!
O YES, I just ate one!

...

The above came to me sometime Tuesday night. Although I don't really eat pigeons, I do like the way it progresses.

I was surpised to discover that today is another un-school day, due (I suppose) to a combination of sidewalk ice (partially remelted once-crunchy sleet, refrozen slick) and wind chill near zero degrees Farenheit. There may also be nasty ice remaining on roads in the less money/people-dense parts of the city.

If there's school tomorrow (and I imagine there will be), it'll be a hard-to-manage day, a Friday wedged between 2.3 snow days and a 3 day weekend. If I've got halfway decent attendance, I'll work the poor dears to death, though. I find that on the days that others throw away, the students are starving for something active to do. Other teachers will toss a DVD into their high-tech "Teaching" Station on such a day, or something equally low-energy. More for me, once I get over the initial resistance to pattern disruption.


I'm bothered that the Water From India hasn't started bubbling in earnest yet. I'm using a new brand of yeast, and if it stays unfermenting for more than today, I'll pitch in some of the old brand (or even an innoculation from a currently fermenting batch) and let them compete, and so put my college Honors Project to good use. Pity I can't observe the syntax trees for the yeast-cultures. I wonder how complex their genome is, anyway?

Edit: Saccharomyces' genome has 16 chromosomes. They've got a website.

Baking soda is a much more constant companion. Time for pancakes. :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I brewed a new batch of mead last night, a straightforward 5-gallon affair with clover honey, about two cups sliced ginger, and 4 bags of black tea. I record here for the sake of my ailing memory that the specific gravity of this mix was just shy of 1100 grams per liter, giving us a potential alcohol content of 13 or 14 percent, by volume.

The airlock is a clever sideways S-curve thing, which traps the gas in the first up-curve until the pressure overcomes the water at the bottom U, pushing out the CO2 without letting in nasty oxygen, to keep the aerobic organisms at bay and the sugar-eating yeasts the dominant culture. I didn't have a third stopper-with-a-hole-in-it for the plastic water jug I've pitched this brew in, so I poked a hole in a conveniently sized juice lid and sealed it with candlewax. Just like MacGyver would, if he didn't chew gum.

The batch's name came to me in a vision-flash, of the Maryland Renaissance Festival's sword swallower Johnny Fox (also founder of the Freakatorium, and a likely contender in a Bruce Campbell lookalike contest), who performs a running gag of pouring water from a vessel which apparently fully empties itself on each pouring, yet more is poured from it a dozen times throughout the act. He calls it "Water From India", and claims it as his protection and the source of his sword-swallowing abilities.

So Water From India it is, an apt name for a tea and ginger brew. The likely label appears below.

---

In other news, today was a snow-day, ice outside and a lovely gas fire within. I cooked and cleaned and read and sketched and doodled and poked about in C++, a finely productive day.
:ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:Firefly be damned, and Farscape can take a back seat. Put Star Trek on the shelf in the closet. None of them are on the air, in any case. Doctor Who is back, and it's a delicious reincarnation.

I just finished chewing through the 2005 season of BBC's new series, 13 episodes in just over a week. I  ate too quickly, but each bite was uniquely delectable. Episodic science-fiction with sufficient variety in place and theme, nonetheless woven together nicely with a thread of continuity, development and purpose.

Upon reflection, a dominant plot structure emerges (interloping aliens threaten the future/past/existence of Earth and/or humanity (usually on purpose, sometimes not), the Doctor arrives at a convenient time and must make a Moral Decision while saving the world and protecting his companion (who he continues to make googly eyes at, but little else in that regard). That repetition really didn't bother me, and I hardly noticed it in the thick of things. There's rich (somewhat essentialized, iconic) settings and slightly silly (but often impressive and quite varied) effects and creature makeup, a good blending of the show's retro roots with modern tastes and technology. It feels like Doctor Who should, albeit at a faster pace - I recall a certain lazy spacey-ness to the Tom Baker (4th Doctor, with the scarf) era, watching it late at night on PBS. This new Doctor (series and person) is witty and quick, action-packed with seat-of-the-pants nervous energy. He's expressive, fierce, conceited, and wears an old leather jacket, and is also goofy and endearing.

The show also makes you proud to be an Englishman (which is surprising, in my case) - loads of honorable moments for Brits, flags proudly waving, picturesque establishing shots of the London skyline. It would be sickening to see a show with the same sort of American flag-waving, but here it feels quite right.

But I gush - my review will not be satisfactory in this state (I've just been introduced to the new New Doctor, and emotions are running high), so I shall end it here.

Well worth your time, in any case, if you've got a police-box-shaped soft-spot in your heart, or even a vaguely sf bend to your knees. Go buy the DVDs, or grab a torrent or two (I'm seeding).

---

In other news, I taught pre-re-precalculus this morning, and it went rather well, I think. I didn't cover as much as I wanted to, which was not (as I feared) because I couldn't keep the pace moving and the students attentive, but because the frickin' fire alarm went off and wouldn't shut up for 30 minutes of my 180, and our Dear Assistant Principal spent more time with bureaucracy than I'd have cared for. I supplied a pleasant intuition for functions (via the Sneetch-Star-Machines of Sylvester McMonkey McBean, courtesy of (The) Doctor Seuss), basic rules for expression manipulation (especially exponential expressions - they had never got the idea of rational exponents in four years of high school math, and had barely touched upon negative ones). I feel like I'll be able to give them sufficient survey and understanding of the Things They Ought To Know such that when they come across them in college, they'll at least know what they are, and that there's something interesting they can do with/to/about them if they go look it up, or maybe they'll even recall it directly. Should they reach that point, I'm okay with approving their marginal passing of precalculus (each having failed it by 5 or 10 percent previously) -- I know I can't reteach the whole of the course in a way that satisfies me in six weeks, but I think I can make at least that much difference.

Ego boost for me, grade boost for them, and they get to graduate on stage. Everybody's a winner.
I also get to buy children's books in a tax-deductible manner.
:ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I've been increasingly dissatisfied with the instability of Firefox on my Mac. It just ate my post.

So I won't talk as much this time.

Boston Game Jam: Folks made "shift" themed games in 36 hours. A neat little sim toy posted thereat didn't work, the source didn't compile nicely for me, even in Windows. So I fixed it, with a hacksaw and GLUT. It works now. Source and (Mac OS X) executable here. I made little tinker-changes, to make the sim more self-sustaining. Recompilers should (I think) only need to change the #includes in "OpenGL.h" to suit the requirements of their own environment. Below is a screenshot of an intermediate stage of tinkering, wherein isolationist tendencies produced orbital death platforms instead of gentle slopes.



Super Bowl Ads:
Most of them are bad. I'm glad I don't work in an office, or drive a car. Fewer look-at-me-I'm-sexy ads, with the exception of GoDaddy. Robert Goulet makes a nice nut commercial - best of show, in my book (though there's still a whole inning to go, I think - the final round of commercials might beat it). The Coca-Cola GTA ad is interesting - does it provide a criticism of the game's wanton bad-making, or does its casual parody signal the Grand Theft Auto's entry into the accepted hallows of our culture?

Ultraman makes me smile.
Inconsistent Moon Gravity makes me frown.

I could have sworn the SalesGenie ad would twist wittily by the end. Woe to the world that it did not.

I wonder who's winning the Super Ball game? I suspect that many home-runs and three-point shots have occurred in the time between the new batches of commercials. And so on, with the non-sports humor.

Go Yeomen? :ENDTESTO:

:TESTO:I've just agreed to teach a Pre-Calculus I've-Failed-And-Want-To-Graduate course on Saturday mornings, to about 15 students. 7 sessions at 3 hours apiece. Half of the students who were assigned precalculus last semester have failed it, and many of them are quite bright, but hadn't been challenged by a teacher holding them to true high-school senior honors-level standards before. So I expect I can help enough of them understand the pre-calculus Big Ideas well enough to validate their passing.

It looks like I'll have a fairly free hand in what I'll actually teach, and not a lot of time to do it in. I'd like to focus this Credit Recovery Course on the necessaries for college math, bonus points if it covers most of the Pre-Calc syllabus.

So let's have a poll, and generate some comments. What do you (dear reader) consider to be the most important skills and concepts to grasp before approaching college math (possibly calculus)?

And if any of y'all have any particularly fond classroom memories, activities, successful teaching strategies, or photocopied syllabi from pre-calc, share them. 

The last Saturday class (and the consequent exam) falls just three centimonths past Pi day. Double bonus. :ENDTESTO: