Day Three : Written In Stone

Brooklyn, Ohio

The man takes no notice of me when he walks into the office. He looks tired, as usual. He sits down, boots up his computer, waits for his email program to load. He sips his coffee and checks his phone for…what? Twitter notices? New email? His schedule for the day?

Whatever it is, he glances back up at his screen when email becomes available. The look on his face is slightly glazed: he has not yet left to get coffee. His brow creases as he reads the email, then smooths as he moves past it.

One day is much as the next. I do not know why I have been assigned to this one, but I’m sure my superiors have good reasons for making me watch him. I record my findings on my stone tablet, sending the information through the aether to She Who Watches All Things.

He sighs and locks his desktop, then wanders off on some errand or another. I watch him get lost in the maze of cubicles.

I sit. I record. I wait for him to return.

Day Two : Recovery Salad

Souper Market, Lakewood, Ohio

“Rassilon demands protein,” Mike said as we walked out the door.

“Rassilon demands roughage,” I countered, zipping my coat closed to ward off the cold wind. “We didn’t overdo it last night, but the food we had was pretty rich. I haven’t had anything that heavy in a while.”

“Where did you eat?” Cory asked.

“Wherever we stopped. Meat and cheese platter…” I began.

“Charcuterie,” Mike corrected.

“Charcuterie,” I conceded, “at Market Garden, sushi roll at Dragonfly, a small Naples-style pizza at Bar Cento.”

“Lots of cheese,” Cory observed. “That’ll stick with you.”

“Exactly why Rassilon demands roughage.” I said.

“Souper Market has Beer Cheese Soup today,” Mike said. “With bacon.”

“Do they have salad?” I asked.

‘They do,” Cory said.

“Rassilon approves,” I said, invoking the Time Lord one last time for good measure.

Day One : A Fine Tuesday Night

The Great Lakes Brewing Company, Ohio City

“What are you doing tonight? I need to get out,” Mike tweeted at me. Tuesday is usually my game night, but with the hostess feeling unwell, I was up for a night out with a good friend. After work, we drove down to West 25th Street in Ohio City, home of the Great Lakes Brewing Company and a number of other fine bars and restaurants.

We started a light pub crawl with visiting Market Garden Brewery, the newest brewpub/distillery on the street.  A light appetizer and two beers later, we walked up the street to Dragonfly for sushi and cocktails. An hour of conversation later found us sampling the amazing Naples-style pizza at Bar Cento, along with an excellent French 75 for me and a Dark and Stormy for Mike. Finally, we finished the evening at the always amazing Velvet Tango Room, a speakeasy-style bar boasting all house-brewed sodas, syrups and bitters, fresh-squeezed juices, and premium liquors. It was the best kind of evening, light drinking and eating with good conversation over several hours. At the end we were both relaxed, refreshed, and recharged.

This, I think, is the art of social drinking. Enough to keep relaxed, but not enough to wind up three sheets to the wind.  Neither of us were drunk, just pleasantly loose. It was a night of aesthetic pleasures and one that I plan on repeating.

You will need:

Read more in the Lair.

My photos follow. Be sure to check out Mike’s photos on his Flickr stream.

Perfect?

Facade

Severance Hall

The Church of the Holy Oil Can

Severance Hall

Bask in the Winter Sun

Zeus Sees You

And…stretch

SMILE

Nerd Machine

 « prev      1   2   3      next »  
(21 Photos)

My good friend Mike teases me about this. He reminds me that I’ve not uploaded a single picture from our last year’s worth of photowalks. Clearly the shame has taken hold; I’ve started to organize my photos and prepare them to upload to my Flickr account.

Therefore, submitted for your delight and comment, some of my favorite photos from my photostream. More to come soon.

 « prev      1   2      next »  
(19 Photos)

photo by Mike Pirnat

(titled with apologies to Jared Axelrod)

With the administrator were two official-looking people. The man wore a dark blue suit; clean-cut, clean-shaven, greying a bit at the temples. The woman was also middle-aged but quite beautiful, brunette hair pulled back, blue eyes that took in everything in the room: the control console, the man in the plexiglass chamber with the wires that led from the console to his head and chest, and the small toy monkey on a stainless-steel table, also connected to the console by another long set of wires.

Jeffers began. “My experiments have to do with developing forms of renewable energy for the future, specifically coming from biological sources. In this case, we have the gentleman in the chamber hooked up to my device, which stimulates the memory centers of the brain. The energy generated by the subject is captured and transmitted, either for use or for storage.”

Jeffers flicked his eyes to the administrator with a question, the administrator nodded. Jeffers turned a central knob on the console about half-way. The results were immediate; the man in the chamber began to smile dreamily and the toy monkey chattered and clapped its cymbals together at a moderate pace. After about thirty seconds, Jeffers turned the device back off, and the monkey stopped.

‘What you just witnessed was the device’s ability to harvest clean emotional energy from a happy emotional response. It is also possible to trigger other emotions for more or less intensity, depending on the quantity of energy desired.”

The woman asked, “The subject volunteered for this?” She looked both intrigued and repulsed by the results.

Jeffers smiled. “The subjects have been told that they will be going under a new form of therapy. We hook them up to our device and induce memories that are emotionally relevant to the energy we want to capture. As you might expect, the more difficult and complex emotions…anger, betrayal, and despair produce the strongest and most efficient energy.”

The man who looked like he worked for a branch of the government asked, “What is the most powerful?”

“Regret. Without a doubt. Regret is the most powerful.”

The government man nodded. The woman in the sharp suit asked, “Don’t you have any ethical qualms about using people this way?”

Dr. Jeffers shook his head. “No. You have to understand…these people are already destroying themselves. We find them in bars, wandering through grocery stores, sitting at playground watching their kids, in cubicles unable to work but unable to do anything else. They are already in pain. We are simply using that pain for the betterment of society.”

The woman nodded. “And does this actually help them?”

Jeffers cleared his throat. “In a manner of speaking. The brain can only handle so much. After a while, it reduces the capability to feel in order to protect itself. In many ways, we are simply accelerating the process an individual would go through naturally.”

The administrator smiled, “Well, now,”  he said, clapping his own hands together, reminding Jeffers of the chattering monkey. ” This is good work, and you can see how it will pay off in the long run.” The government man nodded, the woman in the suit pursed her lips but nodded after a moment.

“Excellent,” the administrator said. “Let’s take a look at the other labs, shall we?” With that, he ushered the official visitors out.

After the door closed, Jeffers released a long breath he did realized he was holding. He sighed and looked at the man in chamber with the electrodes attached to his head and heart.

“You poor bastard,” he said, and twisted the knob all the way to the right. The monkey on the table began to chatter away faster than before.

In the chamber, the man began to cry.

Like any modern person who is well-versed in the ways of the Internet, I know that I can get better news, more timely, more interesting, more custom tailored to my needs by subscribing to a number of RSS feeds and social stream instead of subscribing to my local newspaper.  The hitch in the plan has always been the laptop…I dislike having the laptop and keyboard in front of me when reading.  The reason is purely psychological: as someone who spends all day in front of a traditional computer, I prefer that my off-time be a lap– and desk-top free as possible.

Read More @ The Secret Lair

I’m not listing any projects, any promises, any resolutions. I have them, sure, but I’m not telling you what they are.

We denizens of the Interwebs, we talk so very much. Talk is cheap.  Social networks are easy, full of sound and fury, amounting to very, very little in the end.

You will only hear about what I’m doing this year when it is complete.  Until then, it’s not worth talking about.

• Cutting back on wheat products and gluten does not lead to instant weight loss or weight gain in my case. It did lead to a clearing out of my system and overall I feel better emotionally and physically lowering my wheat intake.
• Sorghum beer has an interesting flavor, and while I do not consider it as good as many of the craft beers I’ve enjoyed, it is refreshing and much lighter.  After cutting back on normal beer for the month, I found drinking too much of it now makes me feel heavy and, for lack of a better term, cludgey and slow. This could be because sorghum beer is relatively low in alcohol, admittedly, so my tolerance has likely been lowered. Either way, I find that I drink craft beers slower and I savor them more now than I did before.
• My craving for sugar (chocolate, candy, etc) is all but gone. I have no desire to load up on candy bars and cookies anymore.
• I had pizza after the month was over. I felt like someone poured lead  into my stomach for the next week. I cannot go back to the way I ate before. I feel awful when I do so.

Reader/Listener Notes

• Scofflaw:  The winning entry in a national contest during Prohibition to coin a word to characterize a person who drinks illegally, chosen from more than 25,000 entries; the $200 winning prize was split between two contestants who sent in the word separately, Henry Irving Dale and Miss Kate L. Butler¹
• The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM) that control access to copyrighted works. It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself².
• The PROTECT IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011; United States Senate Bill S.968) is a proposed law with the stated goal of giving the US government and copyright holders additional tools to curb access to “rogue websites dedicated to infringing or counterfeit goods”, especially those registered outside the U.S.³
• The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), also known as H.R.3261, is a bill that was introduced to the United States House of Representatives on October 26, 2011, by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) and a bipartisan group of 12 initial co-sponsors. The bill expands the ability of U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. Now before the House Judiciary Committee, it builds on the similar PRO-IP Act of 2008 and the corresponding Senate bill, the Protect IP Act.⁴

1. Online Etymology Dictionary: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=scofflaw
2. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act
3. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_IP_Act
4. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

This, via WeAreChangeTV.us:

60 senators betrayed you today, they authorized the indefinite suspension of habeus corpus

UPDATE: 60 senators betrayed you (it was 61, but Sen. Menendez changed his vote). They voted against an amendment to the Defense Authorization act, the indefinite suspension of Habeus Corpus. We are now officially a police state. Read the Amendment provision here. The house version of the bill is available here, 920 pages. Senate text is available here and a PDF of the full senate bill is available here, 682 pages. The amendment to the Defense Authorization act (the Udall amendment) would have removed some of the more draconian measures of the bill. To clear up some of the confusion, Sen. Udall was the good guy here.

We need to remember that the text of the bill would have provided issues for people who had not been legally found guilty (no due process), just suspected. If we look back at our recent history, we can see similar legislation being misused to silence political dissidents. Are you calling for the Federal Reserve to be abolished? Are you a John Bircher? Like the Tea Party better than Occupy or vice versa? Who knows how it can be misused. Not trying to be more alarmist than needed, but we do need to remain vigilant. Ignore your rights, and they will go away.

Read more: http://wearechangetv.us/2011/11/61-senators-betrayed-you-today-they-authorized-the-indefinite-suspension-of-habeus-corpus/#ixzz1fIm2jGea

Does anyone know the truth of this situation?

<Insert rant about the negative effect of  social networks here. You know, the one you’ve already heard.>

I like the way Justin Kownacki tackled the problem. I direct you to his words, as he echoes many of my own thoughts.

The upshot of my thinking is this: We should spend less time being social about nothing and spend more time doing interesting things that are worthy of other people’s attention. 

I am far from done with this book.

What I have is a barrel of context, backstory, character development, and Some Good Ideas. It is not, in any way, a cohesive novel. Oh no. That’s what comes next.  Editing.

I learned some important lessons this year:

•  Have a plan: I approach writing as I do software development…design first, develop second, then refactor until you’re not ashamed of it anymore. This is a critical step;  before this month I had no process to speak of at all.
• Outlines are vital: Everything for which I had an outline reads better and is more entertaining than the places where I was improvising.
• Improvisation is vital:  Making it up as I go gives me new insights into plot, characters, settings and such when the outline grows too staid.
• Write or Die:  True on two fronts. First, if I can put a little down several times a day, wordcounts become trivial. If I stop, I will not start again. Second, the Write or Die tool is an amazing motivator for getting words down quickly. I highly recommend it.
• Stop Overthinking: Just write. Move quickly. Make notes when you want to come back to something. Don’t judge the words before they are on the page, and even then, don’t re-read until it is time for you to edit.
• I Don’t Need NaNoWriMo To Find Time To Write: I did not clear anything special from my schedule to participate this year.  All I did was use my free time wisely. I can do this the rest of the year as well, rendering the need for a month dedicated to writing obsolete.

Thanks!

Go read the article. I’ll wait.

* * *

My first thought when seeing Jeff and Evo’s NaNoWriMo No Mo is that they both came down with a bad case of pompous dickhead. How on earth could something as innocuous as National Novel Writing Month be a bad thing?

I’ve participated in National Novel Writing Month four times. It’s been a valuable tool to kick me in the pants and get my sorry ass moving on projects that sat dormant for most of the year. I work like a fiend for thirty days, and at the end of it, I have a fully fleshed out novel that is ready to go to a publisher.

Except…I don’t. I have what could only charitably be called a first draft. I know that, and I also know that I have a month or two of edits ahead of me to get this bundle of words into shape. There’s a lot more work that goes into writing a novel than what most people can do in thirty days.

The problem, as Jeff and Evo see it, is that people stop after November and never pick up the manuscript again. The point they raise is that NaNoWriMo has become a a time when the wannabe’s come out, trumpet how much work they are doing, and then fail to seal the deal because the words go to waste when they move on to other things in December.

It’s a pity they are correct.

I’ve done it. I’ve written three “novels” in the four years I’ve participated, and none of them have seen the light of day. They made me feel like I was doing something about my desire to write. I felt all writerly for a month, but at the end, I drifted off to other things. “Real Life” reasserted itself, and the novels fell by the wayside.  Reading two of those three, the world is a better place for them staying in a drawer. I have a different perspective on the third one, and more importantly, I’ve learned so much about the process that I can follow through.  There will be edits. There will be publication.

Jeff and Evo are right. You need to keep at it if the work is going to mean anything, if it is going to see the light of day.  Writers write, but very few aspire to be a writer that no one reads. If you want to get the work out to the publish, you need to keep working after November  comes to an end.

Jeff and Evo are also wrong. They tell you to participate in NaNoWriMo only once. I call bullshit. NaNoWriMo can be a useful tool to get things moving, no matter how experienced a writer you are. Each year I have participated has taught me lessons about how I need to approach novel: it has been educational. Without that education, I would not be doing as well with my current work.  Some things take time;  give yourself the time to learn without slacking off and losing that time to other distractions.

NaNoWriMo is a tool. One of many.  It should not be the reason your write the book. If you have a novel in you, write it no matter when you find yourself at the keyboard. Write it, edit it, and get it out there.

Before we got into the thirsty work of my recent trip update, we poured and discussed our beers for the evening. As a foreshadowing on our main topic with Chris, he had a St. Peters Sorghum Beer. The beers John and I enjoyed were a good introduction to my thoughts on Brussels. John had the New Belgium 1554 and I had the New Belgium Trippel. Both ales reminded me strongly of the many beers–dubbels, trippels, blonds, brunes–that I enjoyed every day during my week in Belgium.

The reason for my trip, a business trip, was the EU Hackathon. Some of you may have seen the video I sharedthe really captured the spirit of the event. My Untappd stream reflected almost all of the beers I had while abroad. The highlight of my trip was definitely Moeder Lambic, the one at Place Fontainas. Not only was there an amazing profusion of beers on offer but beer culture is definitely in the very DNA of this establishment. The photos from the very end of the set on my Flickr account are from this venue.

From early on in my trip, I shared how I learned what Belgians consider a black ale versus what we call a black beer here in the states. This experience was from Cafe Leffe and the beer in question was the Westmalle Abbey Dubbel. The 1554, which is very close to the black, or more accurately brown, ales reminded John of another New Belgium, Snow Day, that he had recently.

The best beer of the trip, bar none, a beer that still haunts me was the Val-Dieu Grand Cru. This is a specialty beer, on researching it, from the Abbey du Val-Dieu which may make it hard to find either through an online or a local retailer or importer. The top spot of this beer is saying something considering some of the others I had at Moeder Lambic like the Cantillon Rose du Gambrinus, a two year old framboise lambic, and the Kerkom Winterkoninkske. Bret, our friend and the brewmaster at Growlers, recommended checking with his friends atHalftime Beverage.

One of the other beers I had on the trip, a 12 year old Trappist ale, has just been announced as coming to the states.

Speaking of travel, Chris shared his thoughts on his travel plans for the coming year. He is thinking of trying to head out some place interesting at least once a month. Ideally 2012 will see some great reports from the field by him as well as another brew day with accompanying social time to hang out, relax, and catch up in person.

The subject of brewing with Chris again segued us into a brewing update from him. He shared his thoughts on a pale ale he made and several instructive failures from his experimentations since he last collaborated with us in the beer kitchen. The pale ale, a Bells Two Hearted clone from TastyBrew.com, sounded like a challenging beer while young but may be aging out to something very special, what John dubbed a “hop wine.” The impetus for an experiement so heavily hopped was 10oz of home grown hops from a friend of Chris’. John offered that the experience with this beer was very similar to his with the Green Grass and High Tides.

We ended up chatting a bit about what we’ll be brewing next. As fun as the idea of The Mongrel was, I think John and I want to put the Summer of protest beer behind us and return to familiar responses and new experiments. We are due to brew in my kitchen next. I want to tackle a recipe we tasted and discussed in our triangulation episodes, the Sun-Dial in the Shade Oatmeal Stout.

Chooch told us how to cheer in China, in both Mandarin and Cantonese.

We turned to the reason we invited Chris on, a discussion of gluten free beers and brewing. Chris shared his experiences and impressions from about half a month so far of drinking only gluten free beers. He reminded us why he is doing this for the month of November. In addition to the St. Peter”s he mentioned at the outset, Chris has also tried RedBridge, Lakefront New Grist, and Bard’s.

John has mentioned William Davis’ “Wheat Belly” before, when we were ruminating on the effectiveness of Evo’s brew diet. He brought it up again as being relevant to why wheat may cause some people grief even in the absence of celiac or an actual allergy. Chris offered a similar read that provokes thought around food culture and industry, “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan. In addition to reading and research, Chris is taking a very considered approach that includes journaling his experiences and impressions.

Bolstering the idea that there are unexplored flavors beyond wheat and barley, John had the Great Divide Samurai, a rice beer that definitely compares well to any beer, gluten free or otherwise. He has also brewed with rye and is a fan of its presence in spirits. Basic Brewing Radio had a fantastic episode on gluten free brewing that delved in the flavors available from these ingredients. Search for Desiree Knott of High Gravity in Tulsa to find the episode in question. All three of us are great fans of everything James and company do on that podcast.

Chris explained the thought behind the name he decided to brew under, Speculative Brewing, that captures the adventurous and experimental spirit he brings to brewing. If you want more from Chris specific to beer, check out his recent review of pumpkin ales. He is planning a similar review in December of Christmas and holiday ales. Feel free to participate in the conversastions around both pieces by contributing your thoughts on a related beer in the comments. John or I will add a comment with our impressions of Flying Dog’s The Fear, an outstanding and unusual local pumpkin beer. You can expand the beers Chris is able to review by donating and sending him something local or regional near you. That holds true if you want John and I to try something on mic. Either way, feel free to contact us for details of how to get us beers.