Grandiloquent Bloviator

Whiskey Sidecar v2.0

2012-12-15T17:00:00.000-05:00

We're back to Brown Liquor Season, and I've updated my previous recipe this year.

Today I took an hour or so to make a syrup that will vastly simplify the mixing process through the winter. Here's what I did:

Juice 2 Lemons, 2 Limes, and 2 Oranges into a measuring cup. I got about 1 3/4 C out of mine.
Make a simple syrup of equal volume. I used [Whole Foods 365 Organic Turbinado] Raw Sugar, for what it's worth.
Combine 1 + 2 into a bottle, and refrigerate the resultant syrup.

Now, at cocktail hour, your drink is five easy steps away:

Fill a shaker halfway with ice.
Add 2 1/2 oz. syrup.
Add 2 1/2 oz. whiskey. I prefer Maker's Mark.
Shake vigorously and strain into a rocks glass with a big ice cube in it.
Tell the kids to pipe down, and Enjoy!

If anything, my ratios yielded a syrup that's a little too sweet. I might halve the simple syrup next time, but for now I can just add more whiskey to reduce the sweetness.

Rothko defaced at Tate Modern

2012-11-12T08:00:00.000-05:00

This is no longer news, but my question is timeless: what makes this form of vandalism a crime, and Banksy's serial public defacements "art"?

Just Checking

2012-11-09T08:00:00.000-05:00

It bothers me a fair bit that we still need pads of paper called "checkbooks" to pay for goods and services. It really irks me that my new favorite bank doesn't offer the once-requisite starter set of 100 or so checks for free. What makes my blood boil, though, is stuff like this:

Chat Connecting
System: Connecting... An agent will be with you shortly.
[Agent's Name Redacted]: Welcome to Web Chat. How may I help you today?
Trey Miller: I just noticed that you're charging $18 for UPS ground shipping. If you don't have a free shipping option, I'm going to cancel my order. Time is of no consequence, so there's no rush.
Trey Miller: Do you have a free shipping option?
[Agent's Name Redacted]: We do not have a free shipping option.
Trey Miller: . My order total is $24. does $18 seem right to mail an envelope full of paper?
[Agent's Name Redacted]: What is the item number you are ordering?
[Agent's Name Redacted]: And where are you located?
Trey Miller: North Carolina
[Agent's Name Redacted]: What is the quantity?
Trey Miller: 200 for 2 separate accounts.
Trey Miller: 400 total
[Agent's Name Redacted]: The shipping amount is independent of the cost of the item. the 24 dollars is for the items. and it is about 9 dollars for shipping per item.. that is correct.
Trey Miller: I'm sure it's correct, but does it seem *right* to you?
[Agent's Name Redacted]: I am sorry, I can not waive your shipping
Trey Miller: .
[Agent's Name Redacted]: May I help you with anything else today?
Trey Miller: Nope.

I guess Amazon Prime has spoiled me.

In a weird twist, I went back a couple days later and tried again, and sailed through checkout with free shipping.

Cuts of Wood

2012-11-07T08:00:00.000-05:00

Say what you want about industrial waste, some industries don't waste much.

Twine

2012-11-05T08:00:00.000-05:00

I think this would solve a first-world problem I had awhile back: when our bedroom was on the second floor and the laundry was in the basement, it was inconvenient to run down two flights of stairs to change a load from the washer to the dryer. Even worse, on a cold night, was getting down there 3-5 minutes before the washer was done.

In a world where refrigerators are connected to the Internet, it's inconceivable to me that my washing machine can't text or email me when it's finished.

Star Wars

2012-11-01T08:00:00.000-04:00

Everyone with a website seems to care more about the Disney/Lucasfilm merger than I do, so I have nothing at all to add to the conversation. Well, except to say that as usual The Onion has nailed it.

Silver and Gold

2012-10-31T08:00:00.000-04:00

For the first time in years, I bought an actual, physical CD. Technically, it's a 5-disc box set, and to be totally precise, I pre-ordered it. The purchase? This.

I'm appalled that I just now heard Sufjan Stevens has a new Christmas collection coming out, but delighted nonetheless. His previous set of songs plays nonstop in the Miller home from Midnight on Thanksgiving until New Year's Day.

If anyone happens to have a few extra tickets to the Haw River Ballroom on 11/25 (or a plausible explanation as to why he's playing there), do let me know.

Pants or Trousers?

2012-09-21T14:30:00.000-04:00

I was discussing my new Indochino suit (full review forthcoming, no doubt) with a friend recently, and he kept referring to pants as "trousers." This friend is a blue-blooded American, not an affected wannabe Brit, so I became curious about his conspicuous use of the word. Turns out, he worked for a time at a high-end haberdasher (my word, not his) in the south, where he sold (and bought for himself) bespoke suits and related accoutrements (my word, not his).

I asked at one point: would you ever refer to trousers as "pants"? He flinched at the question, both of his hands twitching reflexively. But he managed to immediately conceal the scandalous nature of my inquiry and simply replied, No.

I'm a khaki pants man, myself. And I've made no secret about my love for Bonobos. Now, for a limited time, if you purchase a pair of Bonobos pants using this link, I'll earn a little referral credit. What's in it for you? A nice pair of trousers, I guess.

The Actress Who Loved Only Numbers

2012-09-17T08:00:00.000-04:00

Google can calculate any Bacon Number in real-time. For some reason, the dozen or so people I tried all came back with a Bacon Number of 2.

I was delighted to discover that there's such a thing as an Erdős–Bacon number, and the four actors with the lowest Erdős–Bacon numbers are women…take THAT Larry Summers!

What the Founder’s Email Address Says About Your Startup – GenuineVC

2012-09-06T12:00:00.000-04:00

I wish I'd written this five years ago. Spot-on.

via Chris Blattman.

Can Cricket Thrive in the US?

2012-09-05T08:00:00.000-04:00

My guess is "no." The end of this article identifies a number of obstacles, and I suspect there are many more. Proponents may also be trying to sell it in the wrong terms:

The league will be launched in direct competition to the English season with ambitions to attract many of the world's top stars for what Neil Maxwell, one of the main proponents, is presenting to the States as "baseball on steroids."

We already have a "baseball on steroids" here in the US. We call it "baseball."

I grew up with a mild interest in, and average understanding of, our national pastime. During the year I lived in Australia, I set my mind to understanding cricket, and it was only after I stopped trying to compare it to baseball that I made any progress at all. Of the two sports, I find cricket much more fascinating, although I suspect that's mostly because of the novelty.

Summer's Over

2012-09-04T08:00:00.000-04:00

Hola, amigos. I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I been puttin' out fires left and right. The truth is, I never planned to take the summer off, but about halfway through July I realized that's just what I'd been doing. So, in my mind, I made it official and decided I'd start posting again after Labor Day.

Did you miss me? Are you still around? I suspect that most people don't visit websites directly anymore, and 99% of my loyal fans have this site tucked safely into their RSS reader, in which case the answers are likely "no," and "yes," respectively.

At least two people, both of whom had much busier summers than I did, inquired as to my whereabouts and general state of being. There's nothing more humbling than telling someone who has (in the span of three months): consolidated residences from two different states into a single NY apartment, changed jobs, made multiple international trips with a toddler in-tow, and still managed to put up high-quality content on his own website...there's nothing worse than telling that guy you've been "kinda busy lately." But "busy" is a relative term, right?

Now that the summer's over, I'm excited to get back to writing. If that's what we can call this. I've been using my time off to conjure up some grand plans for my little corner of the Internet:
Read more »

100 Riffs in 12 Minutes

2012-07-05T12:00:00.000-04:00

Alex Chadwick plays A Brief History of Rock ~~and~~ N' Roll…

Between riff 60 and 61 he tunes to drop-D in a single twist of the peg, and then later goes back to a standard-E, without ever losing tempo (he does it again at 72/73 and 75/76). Unbelievable. Also, the way he deftly picks up the slide for Seven Nation Army #88 while holding a hammered note with his right hand is fairly impressive.

I was surprised and pleased by his pick for #100.

Some friends and I were discussing recently how different technical proficiency is from "soul" or whatever characterizes the musicianship of great artists. (See: Steve Gadd vs. just about any other dude trying to teach a Steve Gadd rhythm.) Alex seems to have a feel for all of these songs beyond technical rudiments. I get the sense that he could play any song with a band and have groupies waiting backstage. Is this because Alex is a musician and the aforelinked drummers are merely technicians? Is it easier to fake "soul" on the guitar than the drums? Something else?

"All Four Stanzas"

2012-07-04T14:30:00.000-04:00

Isaac Asimov: who knew?

Read It Now

2012-06-22T12:00:00.000-04:00

With Twitter now offering "expanded tweets," I predict this will be the next big twist on a recent revolution:

Sometimes, you want to read a piece of longform content online.
But if your Instapaper queue has swelled to a completely unmanageable size,
you might want to read that content now, not later.

That's when you'll click the Read It Now button.

I've already maxed out my Read It Now queue, though...so what will come after what's next?

Braking with the Throttle

2012-06-21T14:30:00.000-04:00

Of all the fantastic camera angles and positions that make up a Formula One broadcast, I can't believe we never see the driver's feet in action. Granted, with paddle-shifting, it's probably a lot less interesting, but still: it'd be nice to see something...something more than this, that is. Case in point:

Around the 1:55 mark, you see how much speed a great driver can scrub off with nothing but throttle modulation and steering input. Remarkable.

Gladwell-Simmons IV

2012-06-20T12:00:00.000-04:00

Malcolm Gladwell and Bill Simmons had another extended email conversation a couple weeks ago, and I just got around to reading it. Well worth the time. Sample:

GLADWELL: My turn for a quick tangent: I was in the Orlando airport not long ago, waiting in one of those endless security queues, when I looked up and saw that the ticket agent was escorting someone to the head of the line. She takes him past at least a hundred people and inserts him right in front of the conveyer belt. He wasn't in a hurry. In fact, the guy turned out to be on the same flight I was, which didn't leave for another hour. Who was it? Ray Lewis. Two things. One — there is no way she does that for anyone but a sports star. She would have stopped Albert Einstein if his driver's license looked a little fishy. Second — no one said anything. We all just kind of nodded and looked at each other and said, "Cool! Ray Lewis." Here's a man who makes millions of dollars for hitting people really hard and it somehow makes complete sense to the rest of us that he should be able to cut in ahead of teachers, salesmen, nurses, working moms, and hack writers. If you are someone like Ray Lewis and that kind of thing happens to you every single day of the year, how do you stay normal? Standing in line in airports and other everyday rituals of modern life are the kinds of things that civilize us: As annoying as they are, they remind us that we are all equal and they teach us patience, and they grant us a kind of ultimately useful anonymity. Ray Lewis and celebrities of his ilk never have the privilege of those moments. By the way, Lewis was wearing a daring ochre, Caribbean-style pantsuit that, at some future point, deserves its own Grantland exposé. So yes. It's not easy being LeBron.

Because Howie Said So

2012-06-19T14:30:00.000-04:00

In case you're not crying by the end, you get Coldplay declaring, rather plaintively: "tears streeeam…down yooouuur faaace…" etc. to help you along. I'll not say whether I needed Chris Martin's push over the edge. Manipulative Television at its best.

Kake Korner

2012-06-18T08:30:00.000-04:00

An unremarkable story about a local bakery. But was it written by a middle schooler or a professional journalist? Here's the opening paragraph, in its entirety; you be the judge:

Customers stepping out of their cars in the parking lot of Kake Korner in North Laurel are immediately greeted with the smell of baking cakes wafting through the air. Once they step inside the pink building, the smell grows even stronger.

"All of my friends were on the shelves above."

2012-06-12T08:30:00.000-04:00

Ray Bradbury's passing was noted with equal aplomb by the NYTimes and The Onion. And here's a lovely story about how he produced his earliest draft of Fahrenheit 451. The cheapskate in me (along with the guy who never gets anything done without a deadline of some sort) wonders whether paying $0.20/hr. created a series of "mini-deadlines" to keep his fingers tapping.

Big Wooden Balls. Literally.

2012-06-11T14:30:00.000-04:00

I found this video charming, and oddly fascinating; but the big surprise was the utter lack of double-entendres.

Perhaps it's our culture's over-saturation in post-Michael-Scott "that's what she said" punchlines, but I hear a phrase like the one at :40, for example, and I assume the next words will be "HEY-O" or at least we'll see a wink.

Nope.

Nothing.

Strangers in the Night...

2012-05-30T14:30:00.000-04:00

...exchanging music...

Naked Came the Stranger

2012-05-29T08:30:00.000-04:00

Mike McGrady, Known for a Literary Hoax, Dies at 78. The story behind the hoax is fascinating and entertaining:

That year, The Village Voice rapturously described the book as being “of such perfectly realized awfulness that it will suck your soul right out of your brainpan and through your mouth, and you will happily let it go.”

First published in summer 1969, “Naked Came the Stranger” quickly sold 20,000 copies. Later that summer, Mr. McGrady and his co-conspirators came clean, and news of the book’s genesis made headlines round the world. By the end of the year, the novel had spent 13 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

“What has always worried me,” Mr. McGrady told Newsday in 1990, “are the 20,000 people who bought it before the hoax was exposed.”

The last sentence of the article is the kicker.

Make Your Own Balance Bike in Fifteen Minutes or Less

2012-05-15T12:00:00.000-04:00

If I'd known what a balance bike was two years ago, we would've gotten one for Huck instead of the traditional bike-with-training-wheels setup. I've seen three-year-olds effortlessly wheeling around the neighborhood on a balance bike, and it seems like a great way to get started.

Until this past weekend, I figured we'd get Gus a balance bike for his next birthday; but this didn't help Huck, who's been on training wheels for a couple years. I tried taking Huck's training wheels off last year, and it was not a good day. His disposition, and my lack of patience that day were an unhealthy combination. I was not looking forward to the next two-wheel trial. Then it dawned on me that I could turn Huck's existing pedal bike into a balance bike.

If you follow the three simple steps below, you'll save $150 on a balance bike and get your kid confidently riding as quickly as possible. By reversing Step 2, you'll then have a pedal-bike that should last another couple years (depending on how fast your kid grows).

Read more »

Yauch

2012-05-14T08:30:00.000-04:00

Adam "MCA" Yauch died over a week ago. With Yauch's passing, a significant chunk of my generation's post-pubescent-to-college-aged memories have come bubbling up to the surface. These were our Wonder Years. Most popular accounts of Yauch's unfortunate and untimely death after a three-year battle with cancer seem to use his career as a prism through which to view the arc of the writer's own life. So, in that vein, here's my childhood, as told by the Beastie Boys' discography.

Licensed to Ill
I don't think I owned a legitimate copy of Licensed to Ill until it came out on CD. I know I owned a few copies of the disc over the years. In 1986, my cassette copy was dubbed off my friend Jen's original. Jen (actually, "Jenny" at the time) and her big sister Michelle had all the good music. Jen(ny) and I were in the same grade, and our families were closest friends, but she was obviously much cooler than I was. On Friday nights in middle school, I'd be at her house babysitting her little sisters and dubbing tapes non-stop while Jen was out at a party and our parents were out to dinner. "Was it 'high-speed' dubbing?" you ask. You bet it was!

I blame the poor quality of those dubs for the fact that I never really knew about 2/3 of the words on Licensed to Ill. I sort of knew the sounds and shapes of the words. My lack of cultural knowledge probably didn't help, either. I was re-listening to the album this week for probably the first time in a decade, and I could not believe the subject matter it covers. I can't comprehend the immense cultural and social vocabulary these three kids possessed in their early 20's. Where could a kid go to get an education like the one the Beastie Boys had?

As an almost-40-year-old suburban father of two (not-yet-beastie) boys, I take solace in how little of this album I understood when I was young, and how even-littler was its effect on my middle school mind and behavior.

My 8th grade year, the Beastie Boys played a concert in the DC area, at what was then called the Capital Centre*. I went to that concert with three classmates and our art teacher. I think we had a sense then, but I really appreciate now, just how cool this woman had to be to load us into her station wagon on a Sunday night and drive us into what must have seemed like Satan's Pool Room. Wikipedia provides some perspective:

...the Licensed to Ill tour[...]was a tour clouded in controversy featuring female members of the crowd dancing in cages and a giant motorized inflatable penis similar to one used by The Rolling Stones in the 1970s. The tour was troubled by lawsuits and arrests, with the band accused of provoking the crowd. This culminated in their notorious gig at the Royal Court Theatre, Liverpool, England on May 30, 1987 that erupted into a riot approximately 10 minutes after the Beasties hit the stage and the arrest of Adam Horovitz by Merseyside Police on assault charges.

We went later in the tour, and the erstwhile controversial hydraulic apparatus had been converted to a benign microphone. Nevertheless, could a teacher even consider doing something like this today without risking her job?

The concert was sort of predictable, since we'd already heard all about what happened in previous cities, but there were a couple things no 8th grader could be prepared for:

The upper deck of the Cap Centre was really upper. I mean, we could hardly see what was going on. But I'd never witnessed such a sweaty, beer-soaked mass of people as I saw looking down on the thousands of fans with floor seats, crushing their way to the stage.
I hadn't anticipated the logistics behind keeping three Beastie Boys well-stocked with beer during a show. There were at least three stage-hands, each with a giant tub of ice and beer cans, and their sole purpose for the night was to spot an empty-handed B-Boy and lob a can of beer to him. How this went on for so long, and how the performers were still standing by the end of the show, I'll never know. Part of their trick seemed to be repeatedly spraying huge mouthfuls of beer on the lucky fans closest to the stage.
The opening act at that concert featured an insane, spastic, skinny man wearing a wall clock on a fat gold chain around his neck. They played their set flanked by some sort of para-military group. They currently reside in the "Where Are They Now" file.