Five straight days.

“And if you want to sing out, sing out – and if you want to be free, be free…”

Do you suppose Cat Stevens converted to Islam to escape this bit of his own legacy?

It’s been a while.  Let’s do a meme:

1. The phone rings. Who will it be?

Mortgage sales weasels.  Over and over and over and over and over…

2. When shopping at the grocery store, do you return your cart?

Always. They’re no fun for joyriding anymore.

3. In a social setting, are you more of a talker or a listener?

I wind up talking a lot, which stinks, since I’d rather listen…

4. Do you take compliments well?

Well?  Sure.  Gracefully?  Not so much.  Often?  Pshaw.

5. Do you play Sudoku?

I’ve never even thought about starting.

6. If abandoned alone in the wilderness, would you survive?

For how long?  I probably know some of the basics well enough to get by for a while.  On a desert island with nothing but a volleyball for company?  That might be trouble.

7. Did you ever go to camp as a kid?

Music camp in 7th and 8th grade.

8. What was your favorite game as a kid?

“Escape”.  It was a fairly elaborate and utterly engrossing game we could only play on my dad’s (brick) porch.  It was an L-shaped porch.  The game involved two “guards” and any number of “POWs”.  The “POWs” stayed at the top of the “L”.  One “guard” walked back and forth on the bottom of the “L”; the other, back and forth in my dad’s side yard (below the bottom of the “L”).  The “POWs'” goal was to make it, utterly unseen, back to my Dad’s garage.  They’d jump off the dropoff at the top of the “L”, and try to sneak back to the garage.  But if a “guard” saw them at any point and yelled out “FREEZE” and their name and location (“FREEZE!  Radish, behind the garbage can!”), they were “busted” and had to sit in the “Cooler” (yes, we’d all just watched The Great Escape) at the bottom of the “L” for five minutes; if you got busted twice, you had to be a “guard” (so everyone got rotated through pretty fast).

Although the guards had to walk (broadly) back and forth, getting to the garage was a lot harder than it sounds.  You could shoot straight across the back yard – but it was fairly open, and you’d get caught.  Or you could sneak around the neighbors’ houses – but the mad dash to the garage was pretty exposed.  Or you could crawl down the sidewalk all the way around the block and work your way up the alley – but the guard at the bottom of the “L” had a decent vantage point to catch that sort of thing.  It taught us all a lot of useful skills; stealth, psychology,

My dad, naturally, hated having scads of pre-teens jumping off his porch and crawling about neighbors’ yards.  I didn’t really understand why until I had kids of my own.  But it was a great game, if I say so myself – and yes, I invented most of it.

9. If a sexy person was pursuing you, but you knew she was married, would you?

Noooo. Not even for Scarlett Johannson.

10. Could you date someone with different religious beliefs than you?

Nope.  It’s been a bit of a buzzkill on a few otherwise promising dates over the past ten years.

11. Do you like to pursue or be pursued?

Total pursuer.

12. Use three words to describe yourself?

Gary Larson Lives.

13. Do any songs make you cry?

I never cry.  But if I did, and songs could provoke it, it’d probably be “Here Comes a Regular” by the Replacements.

14. Are you continuing your education?

Always. Just not formally.

15. Do you know how to shoot a gun?

Yes!  And I love it!  It’s the best stress relief there is that doesn’t require another person.

16. Have you ever taken pictures in a photo booth?

Nope.

17. How often do you read books?

Daily?

18. Do you think more about the past, present or future?

Probably the future.  It’s really my big hope.

19. What is your favorite children’s book?

Love You Forever.

20.What color are your eyes?

Blue.

21. How tall are you?

6’5.

22. Where is your dream house located?

On a wilderness island a fifteen minute boat ride from Manhattan.

23. If your house was on fire, what would be the first thing you grabbed?

Assuming my kids are safe?  A photo album.

24. When was the last time you were at Olive Garden?

December, 2003.  Date from…well, not hell.  Date from Richfield.  That’s it.

25. Where was the furthest place you traveled today?

So far?  I picked up my laptop by my bed.  Around 8:30, I’ll bike to work.

26. Do you like mustard?

I love love love the coarse-ground German stuff, with the whole marinaded mustard seeds.  I actually eat that with a spoon.

I’ve been using Yahoo Mail for quite some time now.  It’s always been reliable, with less futzing around with maintenance than I’d have to do running mail off my ISP.

But you’ve packed so much client-side code into the latest version of your mailer – including the wretched embedded Chat client – that Yahoo Mail is as likely to shut down my browser as it is to actually let me see my mail lately.  Especially in Linux, where it slows Firefox down to a miserable limbo; not crashed, but not working.  And it never emerges./

I’m not sure what you think you’ve done, but please stop before I have to switch to GMail.

That is all.

The San Francisco Bay Bridge is closed while engineers fix a cracked “eyebar” – a structural member that transfers weight to the main supports.

Here’s hopeing they do a good job of it.

Or at least, let’s hope they do a better job than the reporters who are writing about it.  Because since the 35W River Bridge collapsed, it seems everyone is a structural engineer.

Eyebars are known to suffer from fatigue cracks.

The same design was used in the Interstate 35 bridge in Minneapolis, which collapsed in 2007 and killed five people.

Well, maybe in the same sense that both bridges had roads running over them.  The 35W bridge was a conventional arch-truss bridge with, to the best of my knowledge, no eyebars; the Bay Bridge is a combination of trusses and a suspension bridge.  Completely different structures.

But other than that…

And while normally I’d point out that the collapse killed thirteen people, I’m assuming the other eight disappeared due to California’s taxing and spending.

She’s a beauty-pageant winner and lingerie model…

Miss Hodge was spotted by the high street store when she won second place in this year’s Miss England contest, after wowing the judges with her performance of a rifle drill, a first for the beauty pageant’s talent section.

…who can also go all Jack Bauer on terrorists:

The part-time model was awarded a medal of bravery for disarming an insurgent while on a tour of Iraq at the age of 18 and was recently promoted.
 

‘We arrested an Iraqi suspect we wanted to question and were taking him back to the prison when we were involved in a road accident,’ she said.

‘Our vehicle rolled over and when I came round the Iraqi had escaped and had our weapons. I knew I had to do something or he would have shot us all dead. It was a real do or die moment.’

‘My training just kicked in and I managed to disarm him, get the weapons back and restrain him.

If I were a lesser guy, I’d say something like “that is the luckiest terrorist in the world”, but I really am better than that.

Up early Sunday. 

Taking a rare bit of sunday morning TV.

Saw the Baby Bell Cheese commercial.

Wondered “who is the lady who does the spot?”

Googled “Baby Bell cheese commercial girl”.

Got my answer.  It took maybe 20 seconds.

Apropos not much.

The sixth season of Top Chef continues tonight. I would have given warning a week ago, but I was caught off guard when the initial episode appeared last week. Good thing I had already prepared to watch the Top Chef Masters finale that night, otherwise I would have been stuck watching one of the twenty seven re-runs of the first episode between its initial broadcast and next week’s show. Nightmare scenario narrowly averted!

Anyway for those who’ve missed it so far, this season the producers chose a slightly more mature and accomplished field of cheftestants than they have in the past. The average age seems to have risen by five or six years – and when that’s the difference between 25 and 30, it makes a big difference in experience and confidence. Also there are no “culinary students” and only one “caterer” in the bunch. These are all chef owners, executive chefs, and sous chefs, some of whom have worked for some of the biggest names in the business.

My personal favorites at the moment (though admittedly it’s too early for it to mean much) are Jennifer Carroll, the hyper-competent and accomplished Philadelphia chef with very little tolerance for BS, and Kevin Gillespie, a jolly looking Atlanta chef with a beard like a rhododendron bush who aced the first elimination challenge in the hyper-competitive field. Michael Isabella, a Washington D. C. chef is looking very strong while thus far getting the Top Chef producers’ full-out villain edit (boo! hiss!). Could make for some good foodie drama in the coming weeks.

Lest I tempt the patience of the readership here, I’ll not go into much detail on the cheffy goings on from week to week. But I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one here tuning in, so it might get mentioned from time to time. For more detailed reviews, the best blog hands down is Dom Armato’s Skillet Doux.

On Thursday and Friday, email and voicemail will be on Autopilot as I roam the hills and bends of Minnesota and Wisconsin, avoiding nature’s fury on a bike I haven’t tried before.

The 2009 Road King, courtesy of Hopkins Hitching Post.

Don’t call me I’ll call you.

With yesterday’s passing of Les Paul, there was really only one option for Hot Gear Friday today.

I wrote this piece about 18 months ago:

It’s a ’57 Gibson Les Paul Standard, one of perhaps the three most sought-after electric guitars in the business. I recall reading that they went for $279, brand new out of the Gibson catalog, during Ike’s second term. When I first started playing guitar during the Carter administration – before the guitar collectors market went insane – they were already going for a stellar $3,000; thirty years later, some of them fetch mid-to-high five figures.

The tiger-stripe lacquer finish and the brick-heavy body create an afternoon’s worth of sustain. The action, like most Gibsons, is nice and low; your fingers just race, which is disconcerting to a Fender player like me. Even thirty years ago, the whole assembly – aged nicely even then – yielded a sweet, round, weathered tone that was the tonal equivalent of James Earl Jones’ voice; it had credibility just because of how it sounded.

I played a ’57 once – not a tiger-stripe, but a Gold-Top, its first cousin – that a friend of the bass player in my very first band had picked up ten years earlier for maybe $100, before the collectors value became established. I’d been playing guitar for maybe two years; I had a long way to go. And yet strapping that bad boy on was like sitting in an F1 Lotus after learning how to drive a combine; it’s hard not to feel like a guitar hero playing a ’57.

The Standard is the iconic representative of the line, but “Les Paul” is to guitars as “Europeans” is to people; there are many different varieties, some of them very dissimilar.

There was the Custom…:

…which added a pickup (usually) and a bunch of extra ivory, and switched to a mahogany rather than maple top, giving a mellower tone (which has translated to lower values on the collector market).

There’s the Deluxe…:

…originally with either mini-humbucker or P90 pickups, which didn’t really take off.

The Les Paul Studio…:

…which was a high-end “just the basics” version aimed at studio musicians, omitting the ornamentation and binding but going high end on the body construction and electronics.  Playing a Studio is an interesting experience; it handles like, well, a high-end Les Paul.  But there’s something about guitar marketing; while it probably played the same as a Standard, there was something that just felt – emotionally, not physically – downmarket.  There’s something about the whole “Les Paul Experience” that’s as much look as sound.

Of course, I always preferred them to the Juniors…:

who certainly have their adherents (Billy Joe Armstrong, Paul Westerberg), but always felt thick and unresponsive to me, a Fender guy.

With all the mythology based around the Les Paul, it’s hard to realize that Gibson was actually losing market share to Fender and their lighter, less-expensive Stratocaster.  To the threat, they responded with the SG – basically a lighter, thinner body with a double-cutaway body:

I never cared for them – I always liked my Ibanez knockoff better – but they did sell like hotcakes.  Looking at video clips of seventies bands, SGs were everywhere.
But it’s the Les Paul that is the rock and roll icon – from the sixties,

…the seventies…

…the eighties…

…nineties…

…well, you get the picture.

Have you ever had the experience of reading a book when, suddenly, you realize you’re no longer doing it because you like it but rather to see just how bad it’s going to get? Ever talked back to a book the way MST3K‘s Tom Servo talks back to a bad movie?

I’ve had that experience recently reading Conn Iggulden’s Emperor: The Gates of Rome. The book purports to be “A Novel of Julius Caesar.” And it kind of is, in the sense that it features a protagonist of that name who lives in the vicinity of some ancient city called Rome. After that you kind of have to take Iggulden’s word for it that he’s writing about THE Julius Caesar because it reads more like Luke Skywalker meets Gladiator as pictured by Michael Bay. It decidedly does not read like the life of the historical man who conquered Gaul, bedded Cleopatra, and inspired Shakespeare to write a play about him sixteen centuries later. Which is not to say it lacks redeeming value. I place great value in laughter after all.

(more…)

…in County Ramsey as a yoong lad; loife was guid.

Of cairse, we were coovered in scabs and coal dust and usually doused in me Da’s vomit – he drank a wee bit – but loife was guid.  We lived oof the boonty o’ the land – the scallion, the arugula, and o’cairse, the staple crop – the tomato.  Acres ‘n acres o’ them, the staff of loife.

Oy remember as a lad, we had tomaters for ayvery meal; tomato toost for breaykfast, boiled tomayters for loonch, tomato bisque with a shot of whuskey for dinner.

Then?  Then came the Greet Tomato Bloight of ’09:

Yes, the same virus that caused the six-year Irish Potato Famine has struck our own tomato crops. Indeed, said blogger has actually found blight on her plants.

The late blight has also shown up in the UK.

More here and here.

Unsurprisingly, the cold and wet summer we’ve had isn’t the best weather for tomatoes (or peppers), but it’s great for a lot of fungi and virus that attack these plants.

It got all the tomayters; the ‘ayrluims, the Bootcher Boyos, the Big Boyos, all of ’em.

We troyed.  We ate endive, mint, even jicama.  But eventually, we couldn’t goo on.

So we emigrated, by the millions.  We sailed to Oirland, where the tomatos practically grow on plants.

And every year, for Saint Barack’s Day, we get droonk and have a parade and vomit in the streets.

But sometoymes oy woonder aboot those oy left behoyd…

(more…)

I just wanted to use my new “Beer” post tag again.

Anyone have a problem with that?

One controversy after another dogs El Presidente as he pours a cold one with his new-found beer buddies.

Earlier this week the White House indicated each man would drink the beer of their choice — Bud Light for President Obama, Blue Moon for the police officer, and perhaps Red Stripe or Beck’s for Gates.

But one Massachusetts congressman thinks another beer entirely should be served: Boston’s own Sam Adams.

In a letter to Obama dated Wednesday, Massachusetts Rep. Richard Neal strongly urges the president not to drink Budweiser, now owned by a Belgian company. Nor should the White House consider serving Miller or Coors, Neal writes, both owned by a United Kingdom conglomerate.

These are weighty issues. This is behavior unbecoming the leader of the free world. I think the President should just resign.

(I glad that I created our new “Beer” tag because it appears to be well positioned for heavy use in the immediate future)

But in the mean time and in light of Congressman Neal’s push to elevate one’s choice of beer to the national stage, we can speak up, be heard, and tell our President what beer we think he should drink for the betterment of our nation (these are all real beers).

Posted by Johnny Roosh in Beer, President Obama| 17 Comments »