This edition of the Quick Tasting Notes™ strays far from the Belgian beers that have dominated lately, back into the Pacific Northwest (at George’s request). Those who visit Snoqualmie Falls for the dramatic waterfalls, or head east to the pass for skiing, probably never knew that there was a brewery nearby. Okay, neither did I, until I found the Avalanche (see the bottom of the linked page). Malty, a deep copper color, no apparent spices, but quite hoppy—in fact, slightly bitter from the strong Northwest hops. Definitely a winter, rather than holiday, beer.
Month: January 2003
Astroturfing in our time
Paul Boutin breaks an interesting story: Someone’s astroturfing local newspaper editorial pages on behalf of the President’s economic growth package. Dozens of newspapers “from Boston to Honolulu,” different names (the list of papers is here). The astroturfing was turned up by Google. Same text every time:
When it comes to the economy, President Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership. The economic growth package he recently proposed takes us in the right direction by accelerating the successful tax cuts of 2001, providing marriage penalty relief, and providing incentives for individuals and small businesses to save and invest. Contrary to the class warfare rhetoric attacking the President’s plan, the proposal helps everyone who pays taxes, and especially the middle class. This year alone, 92 million taxpayers will receive an immediate tax cut averaging $1,083 – and 46 million married couples will get back an average of $1,714. That’s not pocket change for a family struggling through uncertain economic times. Combined with the President’s new initiatives to help the unemployed, this plan gets people back to work and helps every sector of our economy.
What were they thinking? There are no secrets in the blogosphere. How are the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Chicago Tribune, and Boston Globe going to feel about being astroturfed? How seriously are they going to take statements from any official source who’s behind the Bush economic plan as a result?
Here’s a big clue: stop lying to us.
Busy day
Lots of stuff on the plate today. While I work, a few quick pointers to things going on elsewhere:
- Thanks to Dave and Doc for the linkage on yesterday’s open-data release of the Weblogs.com data growth measurements. I was going to offer a clarification to Doc calling this “the diameter of the blogosphere,” but on reflection he’s right. This measures the total activity of the blogosphere, the growth of the content being given back to the web by its users. The fact that this is both existing bloggers being very chatty and new people blogging is important; being able to break down those percentages is probably less important. —I like Doc’s characterization that this is the diameter of the blogosphere rather a lot. This is why he’s a marketing professional and I… well, I am too, but one with a lot less experience. 🙂
- Craig is back from vacation and blogging his cruise experience. It sounds like even the memory of the cruise ship food is enough to make him lethargic.
- George reports that the Big Dig proceeds apace, with the I-90 extension, at $6.5 billion and 3.5 miles the most expensive road ever built, scheduled to open this weekend (connecting the Mass Pike to the Ted Williams Tunnel and making it possible to quickly get to Logan from the rest of the state). George, we expect a driving conditions report when you get the chance.
- Finally, Esta is blogging her ongoing process of applying to the Presbyterian seminary. While there are plenty of b-school admissions bloggers that I know of, I think hers is the only one to blog about seminary.
George: Scrapple and beer
George writes today that he left his Scrapple in Philadelphia. He also notes that it’s hard finding the time to blog. George, the reason it’s so easy for me is I think in blog posts now. It’s all about practice, practice, practice. Plus I tend to want to write more when I’m drinking good beer, which is why I started doing the beer reviews. Right now I’m working through a backlog of Belgian and other brews from the beer club, but once I get the shelf cleared out I’ll be checking out some more local products…
Weblogs.com keeps rollin’ along
A week ago I thought that we might see an uptick in the slope of the growth of Weblogs.com activity, as measured by the high water mark, in coming months. All it took was one little Supreme Court case to do it. The site hit a new high water mark yesterday that was more than 100 weblogs higher than the previous mark (during the MacWorld SF 2003 keynote; this is a hint that increased activity on existing blogs is a major driver of the high water mark). The figure of merit is now 2.8, back to where it was in October.
I thought this was a good time to make my source data available. I will continue to post comments as new high water marks are reached, but I think it will be more useful if people can get to the data themselves. It’s now downloadable in Excel format from this site. (The spreadsheet is under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons license. Feel free to use it wherever you like, just give me credit and make any changes and additional research available.)
Remix
Confession: I’m one of those tiresome people that make mix tapes. Worse, I’m one of those people that go on making mix tapes after high school and college. Worse yet, I make them for myself and generally not for other audiences.
I think Nick Hornby missed out on this one. Mix tapes are worse than top ten lists. At least those are mostly spoken. Mix tapes live forever. And they come back to haunt you. Even if you trade, sell, or throw out the CDs from which the scary songs came.
I’m finding this in a big way at the moment. Now that my CD collection and I are reunited, I’m in the process of recreating all my old mix tapes as MP3 playlists. (There can be no deeper geekery.) In the process, I have to ask myself the painful questions. For instance: Why on earth did I precede that achingly lovely Górecki folk song setting with Dave Matthews’ “Jimi Thing”? (Granted it was before his cringe-inducing Alanis Morrisette duet, but still.) What was I thinking putting a twelve minute mind-numbing funk-jazz fusion number from Herbie Hancock featuring extensive electric piano pitch-bend solo on any mix tape? And why, why on God’s green earth did I put not one, but two album tracks from Jesus Jones on a mix tape—and why also two tracks from Ziggy Marley?
I guess it’s true. Reconnecting with one’s past means facing painful truths. I was a tasteless trend monkey. At least the tracks from the Pixies, Gastr Del Sol, Elvis Costello and others that also stud the tapes argue that there was an element of enduring taste as well.
I was going to claim that there is an art to sequencing a playlist, for tape or computer, having to do with maintaining mood, keeping appropriate tonal and rhythmic continuity (or contrast, as appropriate), and both pleasing and surprising the listener. But then I found there’s a web site that makes the argument for me: Art of the Mix. I suspect I’ll have to put up the mixes I’ve created so you can see how bad it really is. Another time. Here’s the list of mixes (in progress).
Corporations 1, the Commons 0
The Supreme Court voted 7-2 against Larry Lessig’s challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. Justices Breyer and Stevens dissented, saying that the act makes copyright “virtually perpetual” and “inhibit[s] the progress of ‘Science’—by which word the Framers meant learning or knowledge” (Breyer dissent). Justice Stevens dissented more narrowly, arguing that just as states lack the right to extend individual patents, so Congress has no right to extend the term of copyright, and that the majority opinion of the court “rests on the mistaken
premise that this Court has virtually no role in reviewing congressional grants of monopoly privileges to authors,
inventors and their successors.” The Trademark Blog has additional coverage. Doc Searls weighs in to argue that this is the start of a long road, not the end of one. Ernie the Attorney thanks Lessig for his hard efforts. Slashdot has a discussion underway. Meanwhile, the Associated Press calls it “a huge victory for Disney,” laying the blame squarely at the feet of the companies who lobbied so vigorously to protect their monopolies.
RIP, Charles Vandersee
The man who was the dean of the Echols program at Virginia, Charles Vandersee, died of a heart attack on January 2. Vandersee, an English professor, was the dean of the Echols program from 1973 to 1997. Under the program, students had considerable academic freedom to pursue their own courses of study—no major requirement and no required courses.
I wish I had known Dean Vandersee better. I confess that at times I was driven to mild mockery by his donnish demeanor, calling him “DJ Chuckie V (In Full Effect).” I was also less than pleased with the Echols program, primarily because its full social and intellectual benefits seemed reserved for students who lived in the program’s main dorm, Watson (I was a spill-over student and lived the next dorm over). But I always respected him for what he represented: the liberal arts, in the best sense of that phrase. The University is a little poorer for his departure.
Phat Mack
One of the advantages of working at a Large Technology Company is that the people who work there are tech pack rats. And occasionally you score some good stuff. At my old job in 1998, I managed to pick up a Mac IIcx and IIfx for free—both were missing hard drives and memory, of course, but just to hold something that ran a Motorola 68030 chip at 33 MHz and could complete an infinite loop in 30 seconds was cool. (The machines both disappeared when my parents moved from Newport News—my dad probably rightly decided to clear out all non-functioning junk in the process.)
I bring this up because I did it again. I now have a Fat Mac (original Mac with 512K of memory instead of the original 128), a Mac Plus motherboard, an extra 400K disk drive, and something else in an original Apple box (external floppy?) sitting in the trunk of my car. Free. The Fat Mac needs some video work, but otherwise represented to be OK. Of course, the question is what can I possibly do with a Fat Mac? I don’t know, but this is the cue to get that soldering iron for the workshop that I wanted…
Update: Low End Mac has a slew of articles about fixing a Fat Mac. Apparently I’m not alone in keeping a fond place in my heart for these older machines.
Quick tasting notes: Delirium Tremens Noël
It’s a little late to be tasting holiday beers, but I found the Delirium Tremens holiday beer, their Noël, in the wine department of DeLaurenti’s at Pike Place Market on Saturday and had to check it out. This holiday beer, like the Orchard Street Jingle Ale, is spiced; unlike the Jingle Ale, the Delirium Tremens has a depth of flavor and a sweet bready aftertaste from the complex yeast strains used that keeps you guessing about the flavor. Is it cinnamon? ginger? just fantastic after-flavors from the fermentation? God knows but it’s good.
Francisco Toro: ex-NYT Venezualan blogger
Francisco Toro was apparently asked by his editor, Patrick Lyons, at the New York Times to stop blogging, as it apparently raised the specter of conflict of interest. I suspect the real issue, as he suggests in his open letter to Lyons, was his activism. At any rate, he has quit the paper and unshuttered his blog, and I think it will continue to prove to be the best way to understand the chaos that continues in Venezuala.
Blogroll update: great writers new and old
Two additions to the blogroll, both of whom belong in some sort of canon or other: Samuel Pepys and William Gibson. Two blogs, two very different writers. To misquote Dickens, Pepys is dead, to begin with. But Phil Gyford is turning Pepys’s diary into a daily blog. Good reading and the comments (aka “annotations”) are fascinating. The ninth features such discussions as the date of the arrival of coffee in London and a discussion of Parliamentary politics after the age of Cromwell.
William Gibson is, of course, not dead (he’s just resting). So far since his blog started a week ago he’s kept it daily and is writing about topics as diverse as his life, his pets, and his books. Great entry today about Joseph Cornell, whom I discovered through Gibson’s description of his works in Count Zero. Through it all, there’s a refreshing humanity and lack of pretense:
Well, you might try keeping mind that behind whatever mediated projection of “William Gibson” we’re both, in our different ways, complicit in, there’s a guy who once sat on the cold kitchen floor in his bathrobe, trying rather unsuccessfully to squirt disturbingly black fluid down the throat of a small, intensely uncooperative dog.
No 802.11g for you…maybe
When I read that Steve Jobs announced Apple’s support of 802.11g (WiFi on steroids), I was thrilled. Thrill gave way to dismay pretty quickly as I remembered I had already bought a new 802.11b access point. My dismay may be both short-lived and prolonged, however.
First, short-lived: the new AirPort Extreme card does not fit existing devices’ AirPort slots. In fact, according to some observers, the bus speeds needed for 802.11g are too high to be supported by the existing AirPort slot. Second, prolonged: the WiFi News blog (formerly 802.11b News) points to a slew of PC cards and access points from other makers that support the new standard. So I might still have options for my old Pismo…but I can’t upgrade for a while anyway.
Quick tasting notes: Brouwerij Verhaeghe Echte Kriek
There comes a moment in every young beer drinker’s life when he either discovers the great world of tastes beyond Miller Genuine Draft or forever languishes in longneck hell. For me, there were several such moments in Charlottesville—my first Samuel Smith’s Oatmeal Stout at the late lamented Kafkafé, drinking Hefeweizen in the Court Square Tavern—but my first fruit lambic didn’t make too much of an impression. I don’t remember whether I was in school or already in Northern Virginia, but I remember my friend John Liepold raving about Lindeman’s Framboise and Kriek. I have to say that my first lambic didn’t make that much of an impression. Sweet like soda pop was my first and probably only thought.
I’ve learned a few things since then about beer. For one thing, lambic is a fascinating drink with or without fruit. A true lambic is fermented in open air tuns, and naturally occurring yeast strains in the environment contribute tremendous complexity and depth of taste. Some lambics, such as the wonderful “old red” Rodenbach of Flanders, develop a piquantly sour taste that is simultaneously challenging and refreshing. And adding real fruit to a lambic (instead of the extracts rumored to be used in many of the more outlandish beers from Lindeman, including the Cassis and Banana flavors) contributes natural sweetness and color and deepens the flavor.
Knowing all this, I was thrilled to see that one of my most recent shipments from the RealBeer Club included Brouwerij Verhaeghe’s Echte Kriek. The echte means “real,” and this is indeed the real thing, intense sour lambic flavored with big handfuls of cherries. The color is a reddish brown with no suspicious hints of gold; the mouthfeel is dry, the nose is aromatic without being cloying. The taste… sour cherries but more complex, the classic lambic “sour ale” taste hitting the palate just after the first flavor of cherries. There isn’t a lot of depth of flavor beyond the combination of sweetish cherries and sour-ish beer, but my God, what else could you want? Highly recommended.
Dog show
Lisa and I went to a dog show in Puyallup on Friday night. We thought, What better way to find a breeder who could tell us about how to get a Bichon Frisé puppy? Well, apparently the right answer was, “Lots of better ways.”
But not to get too far ahead of the story. The dog show was being held in the Puyallup fair grounds, about thirty miles south of where we live, to the east of SeaTac. This means that on a Friday afternoon at 4 pm, it was about seventy minutes away. We got there at about 5:45. The papers we had said the show, which included the meeting of the Puget Sound Bichon Frisé club, would go until 10 pm. Plenty of time, we thought.
We walked into the first building, which looked like a preparatory area—dogs in crates, on grooming tables, being watched by twelve-year-old kids—but with no apparent breeders in site and only a small crowd in the far end of the building. We saw another building to the right and walked through. Immediately we were hit with a miasma of dog. More dog crates and pens, stalls selling liver treats and grooming implements—all shuttered. We looked at each other and said, “Uh-oh.” Then we saw chairs at the far end of the next room set up in a ring and heard an announcer’s voice. Finally, I thought, we’ve found it. And a Bichon was on the judging table. We drew closer and realized that this was a general judging of “non-sporting” breeds, not the Bichon Frisé club judging. And there were only about fifty people there. The ones who weren’t handlers in the ring were waiting for their turn to go on. We watched the Bichon take third place and talked to the lady at the AKC desk, only to find out that the Bichon club was meeting in the building we had first been in. We walked back to find most everyone cleared out.
We went away without having talked to a breeder. But we have some addresses and phone numbers, and we’ll press ahead.