My Founding Father is better than yours

File under amusing: the debate team of Hamilton College challenged UVA’s Washingotn and Jefferson Societies to a debate over whose Founding Father was coolest.

Heh.

Knowing a few graduated members of the Jeff and the Wash, all I can say is, I hope the Hamilton team is prepared to eat crow. And of course, to drink like fish, since they will undoubtedly be treated to a spectacular display of Virginia hospitality.

But one does wonder where the Hamilton College team expect to find their points of superiority, given that their founding father was allergic to democracy. And who are they calling “plump” anyway? I am especially tempted to speculate about the rent paid by the “tenants of rhetoric” [sic], but we’ll let it slide.

QTN™: Rogue Imperial India Pale Ale

Tonight’s Quick Tasting Note regards the Imperial India Pale Ale from Rogue Ales Brewery. A beer in a big 750 ml ceramic bottle with a flip-top stopper, it’s a 9.5% ABV hoppy monster. Hoppy monster in that the hops are so monstrous that the malt almost can’t catch up. The trick with a beer like this is in the balance between hops, malt, and alcohol, and this one clearly seeks to balance out the hops and the alcohol with some neglect for the malt. That said, it’s a really interesting beer: bracing, citrusy, floral, strong. Good match for a plate of bratwurst with mustard.

This, like the Drie Fontainen Oude Gueuze, came from Warehouse Wine and Spirits in Framingham. Their beer selection may not be as wide as Downtown Wine and Spirits in Somerville, but they have the advantage of being near my office and the exceptional things they have are pretty darned exceptional.

Diebold: Why aren’t you content to be assimilated?

Boston Globe: Voting device pact at issue. The municipal election in Arlington today raised this article to my attention. Voting machines by AutoMARK, which use a touchscreen to produce a paper ballot as part of a disabled voter assistance measure, were in use in some precincts in Arlington today. And Diebold would have liked to stop them: they’ve filed suit against the state for choosing the wrong product.

Yes, seriously.

I hope that AutoMARK’s machines passed some of the tests that Diebold’s have failed, such as not being able to be opened using an ordinary file cabinet key and not being able to be arbitrarily manipulated to rig an election. But even if that level of testing hasn’t been conducted, the premise of the suit is pretty hysterical. After all, why wouldn’t one want to purchase insecure, hackable voting machines that don’t leave a paper trail?

Today’s links

AnywhereCD: MP3 Albums and CDs. Kind of like the major label version of eMusic, without the rich metadata and recommendations features. Worth it? Well, if you wanted to get DRM-free recordings of Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony from Elektra, for instance …

UVA: Largest single gift to UVA funds new school. Alum Frank Batten Sr. gives $100 million for a school of leadership and public policy. Wow. That could have bought a lot of scholarships.

Isn’t that convenient?

Plan for a cover-up:

  1. Get a job at the White House, on the taxpayers’ dime, doing hard political work for the RNC.
  2. Send over 90% of your work email through RNC servers rather than government servers, thus (apparently) evading government document retention laws and thereby ducking future prosecution for any acts one might commit.
  3. Realize that you screwed up, since emails sent on an RNC email account cannot possibly be covered by claims of executive privilege.
  4. Today, conveniently, White House “loses” sensitive emails sent on illegal RNC server.

Hmm.

Another Googlegänger

I got a Google alert today that I was on Real Networks’ Rhapsody—as an artist. It’s not me, of course. Apparently there’s a connection through Ted Jarrett, one of the first African-American record producers, who started some of the classic Nashville R&B labels (Champion, Calvert, Cherokee) and worked later with Poncello and other labels. Turns out there’s even a Poncello collection on eMusic. Makes me wonder how that Tim Jarrett, who is on that anthology, is connected to him—relative? Brother? The all-knowing Wikipedia is silent on the subject.

Today’s links

MemeCode: Undocumented command line parameters for WinZip32.exe. God only knows how old this document is; it references cc:Mail. But this works, in my testing, on WinZip 9.0. Note that Corel would like to get you to upgrade to the Pro version of WinZip 10 or later so that you can download an addin that accomplishes much the same thing.

MIT: Science Trivia Challenge. Would that I were younger I’d feel a little odd now fielding a trivia team, even if it was an “open division.”

Easter feaster

Relatively light Easter meals yesterday. It was just the family at home, so we took it easy. We went to the early service at Old South, came back, and had fried eggs with prosciutto and hot cross buns for a late breakfast. Then I made my wasabi deviled eggs (recipe below) and White Lily biscuits, Lisa prepared some asparagus, and together Lisa and I baked a ham. But really: that, plus a chocolate cake that was lying around, plus Easter marshmallows (not Peeps) and some pretty spectacular sauvignon blanc: who needed anything else?

The wasabi deviled eggs, by the way, are dead easy. I use the recipe for deviled eggs from the late 1990s edition of The Joy of Cooking, scaling it up for a dozen eggs, then add two tablespoons of dry wasabi powder that have been mixed with two tablespoons water. That, plus adjusting the other spices to taste, is really it. Sometimes I get aggressive and add more wasabi, but at the proportions above it’s just about right. I got the idea one year when I was trying to replicate my dad’s eggs, which use horseradish, but the only thing I could find at the store was wasabi.

Smack my Mac up

Yes, I know: Sudden Motion Sensor hacks are passé. But I finally got around to playing with one that invokes Exposé, and now I’m hooked. I ended up modifying it to invoke Dashboard instead, which required changing the script to call key code 111 for the F12 key.

So what does this do? Basically, if I want to see my Dashboard–which has weather and a couple other useful things on it, as well as some truly useless ones–I just tap the side of my laptop. Another tap dismisses it. Like I said: useless. (But very, very fun.)

Friday Random 10: Not much like Easter edition

The holiest of the church seasons has really sneaked up on me this year. It doesn’t help that it snowed another three inches earlier this week, making it feel extremely unlike April. Today, though, with the office quiet, I simply started taking this Random 10 in midstream, and was delighted to find a number of selections from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion—topical, what? There will be repeat artists, because I left it on Shuffle by Album.

  1. Tears for Fears, “Year of the Knife” (The Seeds of Love)
  2. The States, “Parade” (Multiply Not Divide)
  3. Wilhelm Furtwängler, Vienna Philharmonic (J.S. Bach, composer), “Blute Nur, Du Liebes Herz!” (Matthäus-Passion)
  4. Wilhelm Furtwängler, Vienna Philharmonic (J.S. Bach, composer), “Ach, Nun Ist Mein Jesus Hin!/Mit Chor: Wo Ist Denn Dein Freund Hingegangen?” (Matthäus-Passion)
  5. The Tallis Scholars (Manuel Cardoso, composer), “Magnificat (Secundi Toni 5vv)” (Cardoso: Requiem)
  6. The Reindeer Section, “The Day We All Died” (Y’All Get Scared Now, Ya Hear?)
  7. Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Touré, “Gomni” (Talking Timbuktu)
  8. Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Touré, “Amandrai” (Talking Timbuktu)
  9. Lou Reed, “Lisa Says” (Between Thought and Expression)
  10. Lou Reed, “Rock and Roll Heart” (Between Thought and Expression)

QTN™: Drie Fonteinen Oude Gueuze

It’s been a while since I posted a Quick Tasting Note, but the Drie Fonteinen Oude Gueuze merited a note. Blended, as all gueuzes are, from multiple lambics—spontaneously fermented beers—the style is usually a little sour, a little acetic, and wild. This one is no exception, except that it’s a lot sour, a lot acetic, a lot wild: as a taster on BeerAdvocate notes, the beer has a “raw yeastiness that allows me to finally comprehend…the term ‘barnyard’ to describe a beer’s nose…” And it’s barnyard in a good way. The most amazing thing is that it’s appetizing. It makes me hungry. This one was a 2004 bottle that turned up in Warehouse Wine and Spirits in Framingham. I might have to go back and pick up a few more.