Beer: We fear change...

McScrooge's was still out of Ruination (Gunsmith Bob: "Why don't you keep telling everybody how good that stuff is on your blog? It might sell out even faster.") and I just wasn't feeling any Mendocino White Hawk or Dogfish Head 60 Minute, so I left empty handed and hopped back in the car to tool over to Leaf & Ale who, thanks to Tennessee's bizarro liquor laws, hadn't seen me since I discovered Ruination Imperial IPA after Mash House Hoppy Hour IPA got discontinued (the former is a big beer according to tn.gov, and can only be sold in liquor stores here).

A quick chat with the guy at the counter, and I was pointed to Lost Coast Brewery's Indica IPA.

Dang. This is pretty good stuff! Matt should try it, since he likes the Dogfish Head IPAs so much.

Blog Stuff: Notes from a day off.

So, with a whole day to do it and a whole list of things to do, I managed to...

...get my laundry done.

See, the whole plan for the day was contingent on me rolling out the door at 10:00AM, hitting the bank, the oil change joint, dropping my clothes off at the wash-n-fold, strafing Borders, eating at the Chop House, picking up my clothes, swinging by McScrooge's to lay in the weekend supply of Ruination, and lastly, hitting Kroger for a 12-pack of Vault Zero and some odds and ends.

Things began to fall apart because Lois McMaster Bujold is entirely too entertaining a writer. I was reading Young Miles (specifically, The Warrior's Apprentice) and enjoying myself so thoroughly that... whoops! Is it noon thirty already? Well, we can wait on the oil change 'til Monday morning; just a few more pages here... Next thing I knew, it was one thirty, and the three hours of sleep I'd gotten the night before were starting to tell. I set the alarm clock and went face-down for an hour's nap.

So, out the door, through the bank drive-thru, drop off the clothes, and off on our second mission: Hitting Borders to acquire a copy of Kildar. See, PDB and ColtCCO's enthusiastic reviews convinced me to buy Ghost. I read it and loved its sheer over-the-top cartoonery and wanted more. I'd hit Borders at Turkey Creek on the way home Wednesday night, and they only had Ghost and the third and fourth volumes in the series; I needed the second. So now I rolled into Borders at West Town. Unfortunately they also only had the 3rd and 4th books. Ditto Barnes & Noble. Likewise, Books-A-Million. AAaaarrgghh! Someone has snuck through town and bought every copy of the secong book in the series, while taunting me by leaving the later books on the shelves. Thank gawd for Amazon.

All this swanning about, in and out of bookstores had left me stranded on Kingston Pike, deep in the heart of West Knoxville, at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon. I ducked into the Chop House as much to escape the gridlock as to eat a steak. Which, as it turns out, will probably be my last steak from the Chop House, since the little table tent informed me that they are caving in to the whiners and busybodies and eliminating their smoking section on Monday. Let's see... I've eaten there twice a month at $40 a lick for the past three or four years... How much is that? Anyway, I hope they invest it wisely, 'cause I won't be spending my money there anymore.

After the dismal news at the Chop House, I suppose that I shouldn't have been surprised that McScrooge's was slap out of both Ruination and White Hawk IPA. That was pretty much the cherry on the icing of the cake of my day. I picked up my clothes, decided to skip Kroger, grabbed sodas from the Unterweigel's, and slunk home with my tail between my legs before fate could kick me in the ribs again.

At least the sunset was gorgeous and Lois Bujold was as entertaining to read in the evening as she was in the morning. From what I can tell, the Vorkosigan series promises me hours and hours and hours of Hugo-winning reading for the forseeable future.

And now it's back to work.

I'm cranky and hungry.

Said goodbye to the Kloos clan yesterday. Did my best not to cry in front of Quinn, and mostly succeeded.

I came home and built a fire in the chimenea and had a few of Mendocino's seasonal brew, an Imperial IPA, which was very good. (Although it's no Ruination; but then, what is?) If you're familiar with Dogfish Head's beers, Mendocino's Imperial IPA tastes almost exactly halfway between 60 Minute and 90 Minute Dogfish Head. Gunsmith Bob has been trying to get me to read W.E.B. Griffin for some time, and finally just dropped a copy of The Leftenants in my lap, so I'm reading it. Shakespeare it ain't, but it's an enjoyable way to pass an evening.

Went to bed too late. Got up too early. I needed to go to the grocery store after work, but I blew it off because I was hanging on my chinstrap. Took a nap when I got home and now I have to go run the errands I put off doing earlier.

I think I'll console myself (and get rid of the owie, empty, hurty feeling in my tummy) by going to Kalamata Cafe and dining on a big ol' slab of seared ahi tuna. Back in a bit.

We interrupt this broadcast...

I love you folks to death, all of you. I mean that. I'd like to drive all across America giving each and every one of you a great big misanthropic hug.

Or at least write something smartassed for you to read.

But... further bloggery is going to have to wait 'til I can crawl around a Ruination. That, and I am totally absorbed in David Weber's In Fury Born.

Plus, I also totally need to take a picture for this Sunday's Smith before I forget.

More later...

Lame Excuse Post...

There was supposed to be another gun school post today, but by the time I got home, cleaned my sidearm, rinsed the worst of the crud off, had a bottle of Ruination, and ate, it was beddy-bye time. And now it's this morning and all y'all got was a half-recycled post from yesterday morning.

Today's class starts in an hour or so. Hopefully I'll have more time to write this afternoon.

An accounting for taste.

Matt has a great post up on his history with beer. It's chock full of beer lore and some interesting musings on the fact that beer seems to be such an acquired taste. I know it was for me.

I had one or two adolescent encounters (and I say "adolescent" from my current viewpoint; I would have bristled at the term when I was 19...) that resulted in the expected bout of yelling at my shoes. As a result, I couldn't stand the stuff for years. I think the necessary sea change came when I was living with my ex. We were both inveterate computer gamers, and he was a serious coffee drinker. Add the two together, and between the two of us several pots of coffee could vanish in the course of a Friday or Saturday, my share of which was drunk black.

"Bitter" is not a taste sensation the young normally seek out, but several zillion cups of black coffee will make you a connoisseur of bitter. Good coffee bitter. Bad coffee bitter. This-coffee-is-burned bitter... A year later, after a sweltering summer day working at the gun shop, which was in a tin-roofed building with two glass walls and no A/C, my boss offered me a beer after we'd shut down. I seem to recall it was a Miller Genuine Draft in a bottle. I remember it was very cold, and very wet, and boy did it hit the spot. And hey, it didn't even taste bad!

Still, it remained a hot weather beverage for me. Nothing I'd seek out for the taste, specifically, mind you. It was another couple years until a friend introduced me to Whitbread Ale on draft at a local pub. This was actually tasty; something you'd drink just for the pleasure of drinking it, not just to cool off on a hot day. From there, it was a just a short hop to Bass and Sweetwater 420 IPA, Mendocino White Hawk and Stone Ruination, IPA's and Barleywines.

Anyhow, Matt, that's how it happened for me.

Busy day...

1. Drop clothes off.

2. Run by bank.

3. Go to Office Despot or somesuch joint and get them to package and ship three live steel swords without freaking or going into some hoplophobic faint.

4. Stop by McScrooge's and see if they've finally managed to score any Ruination.

5. Pick up clothes.

6. Slave to the grind. Maybe finish the MAS-49/56 thing without it reading like stereo instructions, maybe just write for fun on one of the old Macs.

7. Park my butt in a chair on the porch and lose myself in the adventures of Miles Vorkosigan.

8. Watch sun set.

9. Feel all content and productive.



We'll see how much of that list I can get checked off. ;)
(Note to self: Remember to eat a meal in there somewhere.)

Today was a good day...

Driving home from visiting Marko, the Munchkin, and the Sprog-ette, I was stopped by a school bus heading the other way. I took advantage of the pause to power down the top, which met with enthusiastic approval from the kiddies, and motored home under severe clear skies, 80F and dry, Heaven Or Las Vegas up loud on the CD player, and a half-case of Ruination IPA in the passenger footwell, having just left hanging out with a good friend and showing off the 1904-vintage Colt Pocket Hammerless I picked up at the gun show last weekend. The weather was so perfect that for the last bit of twisty road through the forest, I crawled along at about 10 or 15 MPH and just goggled at the woods all around me. I saw a wild turkey, too. It's days like this that I think it must suck not being me. ;)

I guess I'll go soak up the wonderfulness on the porch for a bit, since reality will be back to tread on my dreams tomorrow.

Blog Stuff: Some recent thoughts...

1) I will know that I am really cool when I get to carry an M4 carbine everywhere, like the grocery store & the mall, and I have a guy whose full-time job is to do nothing but follow me around all day with a boom box playing the "Imperial March" from Star Wars. Then, then I will truly be cool.

2) While the idea of Valhalla is groovy, what with the "warring all day and partying all night" aspect and all, I think an even better afterlife would be one where you spend eternity hot-lapping the Nürburgring in a Porsche 911 Turbo, while swilling Ruination from the bottle and shooting out the window at road signs with an MP5. Also, Chuck Schumer is wearing a little janitor's outfit like the mascot from Cracked, sweeping up busted bottles and spent brass on the side of the track. That would be a totally awesome final reward. I need to get to work on whipping up a sect where this is the payoff.

Books: You could look it up.

I'm bored...


...so here's a picture of some books. A good reference library is important to a geek in much the same way that piles of coins are important to Scrooge McDuck; we like rolling in piles of them about as much as we like reading them. It gives us comfort.

I've totally filled this unit and another just like it. I've probably got another five or ten shelves worth of big hardbacks on the floor, awaiting the day I can shanghai a friend with a truck to go with me to the Particle Board Forest in WallyWorld and chop down another shelving unit or two.

(The empty Ruination case on its side is being filled with Car & Drivers, preparatory to filing.)

Oh, thank gawd you're back!

I've missed you guys so much! The 'net just stopped responding, and I've been sitting here for the last 24 hours clicking "refresh" as my eyes slowly glazed over.

Well, that, and talking to Matt G on the phone. Hi, Matt!

I ran by Border's, got some books, and did a little bit of reading, too; more on which later.

Oh, and picked up my laundry from the laundry place.

...and stopped by McScrooge's for some Ruination and a bottle of Old Ruffian Barley Wine. I'll report on that last later tonight; I have high hopes. (Barleywines are kind of a new thing for me; so far I've loved Stone's Old Guardian and Rogue's Old Crustacean, been indifferent toward's Flying Dog's Horn Dog, and thought that Talon from Mendocino and Dogfish Head's Olde School were icky.)

And gunsmith Bob stopped by and we went to McKay's and I got more books, and then we stopped at Kroger so I could get some groceries and fresh citronella candles for the porch.

But other than that, I spent the whole time the 'net connection was down clicking the 'refresh' button and missing y'all.

Blog Stuff: Beer blogging.

On the recommendation of Matt G, I decided to give Dogfish Head's Indian Brown Ale a whirl. Admittedly, it was with some trepidation, because on the whole I heartily disapprove of beer ingredients that are not water, hops, barley, and yeast.

Verily I say unto you, it does not suck.

As a matter of fact, I liked the trial run so well, that there's a six pack in the fridge. It'll make a nice change of pace from my usual Ruination or Mendocino White Hawk IPA.

It can be obtained here in Knox Vegas at McScrooge's, home of a truly righteous big beer selection.

Happy Winter Solstice!

I'll be staying up past midnight tonight to make sure the reluctant sun does his job and starts staying in the sky longer every day.

It was a big time of year for our ancestors. Was the sun going to punk out and let days get shorter until it just stayed gone, or was the yearly cycle going to continue? It made for as good a reason as any for a religious ceremony, and a religious ceremony tends to make as good a reason as any for a festival. Later religions simply found it easier to park holidays (from Saturnalia to Christmas) around Midwinter than to change what was already there.

So there you go; I'll be sitting there at 12:22AM, Ruination in hand, keeping an eye on the celestial spheres. Once I'm sure that eveything's all shipshape in the heavens, then I'll go to bed. It's as good a reason to stay up late as any...

Thankful for:

1) All the friends who cared enough to invite me to Thanksgiving dinner.
2) All the friends who know me well enough to follow their invite with "...but you'd probably rather have a day alone."
3) Barbed wire.
4) Campbell's putting pull-tab lids on their canned chili.
5) Ruination IPA.
6) "Pain Is Good"® brand hot sauce (Batch #37, Garlic Style).
7) John Moses Browning.
8) Johannes Gutenberg.
9) Capocollo, Swiss cheese, and Wäsä rye crisps.
10) Keith Gordon's masterful direction of Vonnegut's Mother Night.
11) "Off" switches on cell phones.

Beer blogging postscript...

Stopped by McScrooge's on the way home from work tonight. Stocked up. Chatted with the guy on duty; turns out he's looking for a CCW class. It felt like this classic headline from The Onion...

I grabbed a couple more Ruinations, a four-pack of Dogfish Head 90 Minute Imperial IPA, and a six-pack of Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA. Tried one each of the latter two brews before bed. The 60 Minute was good stuff; a classic, hoppy IPA. The 90 Minute tasted as though they'd set out to make an over-the-top-hopped IPA, then repented at the last minute and tried to balance things back out with the barley. The end result is an initial bitter hops assault, but a correspondingly sweetish malty finish. I think I prefer the ostensibly milder 60 Minute.

Actually, what I prefer is the big ol' 22-oz bottles of Ruination lurking in the fridge; I can hardly wait 'til tomorrow night, when I'll give myself a hump-day reward by popping one open after work...

More beer blogging...

Okay, first for my Foreignese readers, we'll get the dusty old joke out of the way:

Q: "Why is American beer like making love in a canoe?"

A: "Because it's f___ing close to water."

Har-de-har-har. It must suck to realize that the IPAs coming out of Cali totally pwn anything brewed on the Auld Sod... ;)


Anyhow, to continue the discussion going on over at PDB's place, on to my alleged beer snobbery, and hopefully on the way incidentally dispelling some beer myths:

1) I hate American beers.

Actually, every beer I really like is an American beer. The hoppy IPA may have been born in England, but it got its Green Card over a decade ago, and hasn't lived there since.

2) I think Budweiser sucks.

I think Budweiser, Coors, Michelob, and various other megabrews that have cheapened up by diluting their mash with filler grains like rice taste bland. But...

3) I worship microbrewed beers.

Sierra Nevada and Flying Dog are hardly microbreweries these days, and I think that Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and Snake Dog IPA are eminently drinkable brews. Conversely, I've had plenty of supposedly fantastic microbrewed beers that were just, well... lame. For example, I know my Texian friends will recoil at the sound of this, but after my first taste of Shiner Bock, my immediate reaction was "What was all the fuss about? This tastes bland..."

4) I like dark, chewy beers you can't see through.

While I'm not averse to a good Stout on a cold winter night, I vastly, vastly, prefer Pale Ales, India Pale Ales, and their ilk. These are not particularly dark; they tend to be of a blonde-to-golden color. Snake Dog is much more transparent than, say, Killian's. I like hoppy beers. Pilseners, Lagers, Bocks, and all manner of other beers tend to leave me indifferent at best. For me, it's about the flavor, not the pedigree: I don't care if a beer was brewed in the depths of the Schwarzwald by blind monks using an original Sumerian recipe and costs $1,000,000/oz., if it doesn't rate at least in the high 40s on the IBU scale and remain fairly devoid of too much malty sweetness, I'm not interested. (The Ruination I so enjoyed the other night scores north of 100. If you don't squirt lemon into your espresso and chase it with alum, it might seem a bit bitter to you.)



What it really boils down to is this: Having grown accustomed to extremely hoppy beers is like having gotten used to habanero squeezins on your TexMex; it can leave your taste buds a little scorched. Once that happens, it can be hard to enjoy plenty of authentic Mexican food because it's just not as spicy as you've come to expect. The same has happened with me and beer: There are plenty of good beers out there that I can really no longer enjoy because I've become so accustomed to the taste of hops, but as long as there are companies making big, hoppy IPAs, I'll just have to keep muddling through as best I can. :)

I'm ruined...

According to the guys at Leaf & Ale, my supply of Mash House Hoppy Hour IPA was cut off for good. This was a horrible thing, because after the bitter hoppy character of my new favorite beer, going back to Sierra or Bridgeport tasted like drinking Michelob Light (or tapwater. Same thing, really.) The closest approximations I could find readily were Cottonwood's Endo IPA and Snake Dog IPA.

Last night after work, Bob & I stopped by McScrooge's instead of Leaf & Ale. We had to do this because Tennessee's bizarro alcohol laws keep beer above a certain alcohol content, I think something like 6 or 7% ABV, from being sold outside of liquor stores (and, incidentally, liquor stores in TN can't sell anything but liquor; no cokes, no mixers, no chips, no smokes. Weird.) We were on a mission. Bob was still looking for some Tucher beer or another, and had given up trying to find it in grocery stores or even specialty beer joints like Leaf & Ale. Maybe its alcohol content was high enough to keep it confined to the booze-a-rama?

Anyway, hallelujah, but did they have a pretty good beer selection. Bob tried the Delirium Tremens Belgian Ale, and pronounced it good. I finally picked up some of Stone Brewing Company's Ruination IPA, and "they" were right: hop-head nirvana. I'm ruined. They also have plenty of Dogfish Head's products for sale there, so I forsee it being a while until I've run out of new beers to try.

Books are why we work...

See, housing costs money, and you need a house to keep your books in so that they don't get wet or blow around too much. If it weren't for books you wouldn't need a house and could just live under a bridge someplace, which is a lot cheaper and would therefore allow you to retire now.

In an homage to the spirit of books, I'll take up this meme from Phlegmmie via RobertaX:

Which book do you irrationally cringe away from reading, despite seeing only positive reviews?
I avoid lots of probably perfectly good modern fiction because it bores me to tears. Like I've said elsewhere on this blog: "Look, if I want to read about failed relationships, career problems, family struggles, and substance abuse, I'll write a friggin' diary. The characters in the books I like to read have problems, too, but they usually solve them with laser beams or tactical nuclear warheads. I read these books because I wish I could solve my problems that way, too. This is called "escapism", and is why most folks seek entertainment in the first place." I just can't find interest in tales of finding a boyfriend or fixing a flat tire when there are books about rescuing a boyfriend from the Valley of the Trolls or fixing a busted stardrive out there to be read.

If you could bring three characters to life for a social event (afternoon tea, a night of clubbing, perhaps a world cruise), who would they be and what would the event be?
I've actually pondered this one before. I'd like an evening of dinner and drinks with two of my favorite fictional bad boys, Dr. Lecter and Lestat, as they were before their respective authors ruined them. (After Silence of the Lambs and Queen of the Damned, respectively, both these characters were put in, to use Dr. Lecter's brilliant phrase, "moral dignity pants".) The third character's a toughie, because I've always envisioned just the two. Let's occupy the open place setting with... Hmm... Perhaps Woodrow Wilson Smith? He ought to have quite a fund of good stories.

You are told you can't die until you read the most boring novel on the planet. While this immortality is great for awhile, eventually you realise it's past time to die. Which book would you expect to get you a nice grave?
While The Fountainhead is a strong contender for "Most Efficient Conversion of Wood Pulp to Sominex", I am forced here to admit that I have a beautiful hardbound copy of Don Quixote given me by a friend of my father's back in... oh... ninth grade? The bookmark has advanced all of perhaps seventy-five pages in the intervening twenty-five years. At an average clip of three pages per year, I'll be dust and bones long before I'm finished.

Come on, we've all been there. Which book have you pretended, or at least hinted, that you've read, when in fact you've been nowhere near it?
I'm pretty honest when it comes to what I've read and what I haven't. Tower of ego that I am, I'm not worried about people thinking less of me for not having read something.

As an addition to the last question, has there been a book that you really thought you had read, only to realise when you read a review about it/go to 'reread' it that you haven't? Which book?
Y'know, this has never happened to me. The closest approach was when I re-read Anthem a couple of years ago for the first time since the eighth grade. It was not at all the story I remembered. Which was a pleasant surprise, actually, because I remembered it being positively awful and as dull as watching paint dry.

You've been appointed Book Advisor to a VIP (who's not a big reader). What's the first book you'd recommend and why? (if you feel like you'd have to know the person, go ahead of personalise the VIP.
If my VIP has not actually sat down and read 1984, he's about to.

A good fairy comes and grants you one wish: you will have perfect reading comprehension in the foreign language of your choice. Which language do you go with?
Latin. Definitely. I want to read Tacitus and Caesar and Cicero and Polybius and the rest in the original. It pains me, when reading older works in history (and especially military history), to come across a quotation in Latin or Greek that is left untranslated, because it reminds me how woefully uneducated I am.

A mischievous fairy comes and says that you must choose one book that you will reread once a year for the rest of your life (you can read other books as well). Which book would you pick?
Hah! Don't throw me in that briar patch! The list of books I already re-read at least once a year is long enough that if it gets much longer, I won't have time to read new books. LOTR is the ceremonial one, though. I've made it a point to re-read it once a year since I was about twelve.

I know that the book blogging community, and its various challenges, have pushed my reading borders. What's one bookish thing you 'discovered' from book blogging (maybe a new genre, or author, or new appreciation for cover art-anything)?
Were it not for my imaginary friends on teh intarw3bz, I never would have discovered Terry Pratchett and his wonder-full Discworld. Thankyouthankyouthankyou.

That good fairy is back for one final visit. Now, she's granting you your dream library! Describe it. Is everything leatherbound? Is it full of first edition hardcovers? Pristine trade paperbacks? Perhaps a few favourite authors have inscribed their works? Go ahead-let your imagination run free.
Y'know, I was going to do something elaborate here when I realized that I'm looking at a wall of boxes twenty-five feet long by four feet high by two feet deep. If I can find someplace to park them that has a sheltered porch with a comfortable chair, a place to set a beer, and a good friend or two who can enjoy an afternoon spent in the companionable silence of reading, I'm golden. "A good read, a bottle of Ruination, and thou. O, Wilderness were Paradise enow!"