Month: September 2004

QTN™: Rapscallion Premier

This particular quick tasting note is a new one on me. Coming from the Concord Brewery in Lowell, MA, the Rapscallion Premier sounds like it should be a golden Belgian-style strong ale along the lines of Duvel or its imitators (Delerium Tremens, Lucifer, etc.). Instead the color is a gorgeous reddish-blonde, the nose is complex with fruit fragrances (apricot predominates), the up front impression is crisp and vibrant, the body is part-malt, part bitter (maybe a little too bitter) and the finish is lingering. If any note is discordant it’s the hops. I don’t know what they’re using but I would guess Cascade, or else they just have a very heavy hand with the hops, and the bitterness comes close to overwhelming the rest of it. But in the end it kind of balances out in the finish and the overall impression is very strong. I think I’ll have to make a visit.

Free music links

I highly recommend Salon’s Wednesday Morning Download column, which is essentially an MP3 blog in weekly column form. This week Thomas Bartlett is pointing to new songs from John Cale, Mono, Rilo Kiley, Sainte Chapelle, the Mendoza Line, and Sam Amidon.

Last week’s column, a roundup of freely downloadable protest songs, was kind of a gimme by comparison, especially since I seem to recall Salon offering a collection of protest song downloads as a premium benefit a year ago. Occasionally Bartlett slips, as when talking about Sonic Youth’s freely downloadable “Youth Against Fascism” as a protest song aimed at W (the song, from the group’s Dirty album, was really aiming against Bush I and maybe even Reagan), but the column is still worth reading.

Photo sharing goes mainstream

I’ve written about PhotoPeer, a peer-to-peer photo sharing app, before, but this is a whole new ballgame: AOL’s next version of their instant messenger client will include picture-sharing features. That’s an interesting way to approach the main challenge that I saw with a pure peer-to-peer approach, which is how to build a compelling network of participants that’s larger than your immediate friends and family. The AIM approach avoids that problem by piggybacking photo sharing as a feature on top of an existing social network.

Two small pieces of my childhood

Daily Press: Longtime business prepares to sell out. Wellworth Cleaners was pretty much the only dry cleaner around when I grew up, and I don’t think we had any wire hangers at all that didn’t have their advertising on them. Now, after 62 years of operation, they’re being sold off for defaulting on their bankruptcy agreements.

I also saw but didn’t bookmark a piece on the death of the last living founder of Pierce’s Pitt Bar-B-Que, Dot Pierce, a while back; unfortunately I can’t find the link. Fortunately Pierce’s is still open for business and now even sells its sauce (though sadly not its barbecue) on line—though through a slow-as-molasses storefront.

CD ripping morality flowchart

London News Review: Should I rip this? A mostly well thought out flowchart indicating the legal and moral questions that go through most consumers’ minds when contemplating getting music by means other than purchasing it. When it says “Should I rip this,” I assume the unspoken corollary is “from a CD other than one I own,” and that “should I download this from a peer-to-peer service” could really be answered with the same flowchart. (Via BoingBoing.)

Commodity downloads, round 2

As I believe I was saying… take a look at the Register’s article on the newest entrant into the music downloads space: Woolworth’s. Yep, department stores are now getting into the music downloads business. And needless to say, with a Windows-only offering that has not been integrated with their other download service, they’re doing a typically mediocre job with it.

Ah well. With commodity service offerings, someone has to be the low end player, I suppose.

Princeton vs. Virginia in the a cappella sweepstakes of love

BoiFromTroy: Princeton Tiger Tones vs. Virginia Hullabahoos. The Boi points out the odd presence of men’s a cappella groups (generally not the same as glee clubs, btw) as entertainment at RNC functions, and rates two participating groups on musical selection, outfits, crowd interaction, and, erm, gayness. Heh. Somewhere some Hullabahoo alums are rolling in their graves. But it’s all good, and it’s good to see a Virginia group get props, even on such nontraditional evaluation criteria.

(Fact-check confidential to Ted B., who comments that the alumni pics show the B’Hoos in “nice frocks”: those are bathrobes, Ted, and come from the fact that fourth-year residents in the original Jeffersonian Lawn rooms have to go outside to go to the bathroom or take a shower. This means on any given morning, you can see the world’s future leaders parading down the sidewalks and steps of a 180-year-old World Heritage landmark in bathrobes with bad bedhead.)

Other stuff

A few odds and ends that have cluttered my desktop for too long:

Labor Day

This is my month to stop taking things for granted, starting with today’s holiday. Labor Day, if it means anything to most Americans, probably means the last cookout, back-to-school shopping, and time to watch out for drunk drivers. It’s all too easy to forget that the holiday, which originated as an annual march by the Knights of Labor, reflects both workers’ efforts to secure saner working conditions from management and the government’s attempts to appease them while avoiding an official celebration of May Day. The benefits secured by the workers include the establishment of the eight-hour work day and 40 hour work week, overtime pay, and the ability to organize to improve working conditions—which sound awfully nostalgic to this tech worker who’s never seen any of them.. See also the Department of Labor’s official page on the holiday.

Incidentally, out of my 250 news feeds, I only found 26 mentions of “Labor Day”, including:

Cooling it

Here’s a quick catch-up houseblog: Esta and I finished painting the dining room this week, covering the inside of the built-in corner cabinet with the same dark blue paint (Behr’s “Bayou,” in case anyone is curious) that Lisa and I used for the walls below the chair rail. The overall effect is striking, with the room looking much brighter in comparison to the cream and tan it was before. I loaded in the cabinet, using the plate rails and pulling our barware out of the kitchen cabinets (we now have a glasses shelf—I’m so pleased).

Yesterday’s trip to the Cape was just the ticket. It was also a merciful interregnum in an ongoing problem we’ve had with the dogs. Both of them have had awkward digestive difficulties over the last week, and it hasn’t gotten better. Fortunately a highly competent vet in Belmont found the problem—some kind of nasty bacterial infection—and aside from a few highly dramatic reactions to the medicine this afternoon they’ve responded well. Both are sleeping soundly on the couches; they didn’t even bat an eye when we ate dinner next to them.

This house continues to feel more and more like a home. I found our photos and another bunch of our cookbooks today; there hasn’t been anything requiring professional intervention, knock wood, going wrong with the house in more than a week; the changing weather has lowered the temperature here to something more than comfortable, in fact cold enough for me to take some concern about the HouseInProgress article about the radiators. Makes me think we ought to fire up the system just to see what happens.

In the meantime, I’m grateful that I can still grill. Garage door open, I sit on a folding chair gifted by my in-laws, keeping an eye on the smoke and flames creeping out from under the lid of Old Faithful, our cheapo Char-Broil gas grill, watching the chicken slowly come to perfection, with a beer bottle beside me sweating condensation into the evening and a book in my hand; I wait for the meat to get just tight enough under my prodding finger (since, without a light on the back of the house, I can’t actually see what I’m cooking even with the garage light on). I drop the chicken piece by piece into the ceramic dish filled with marinade, getting the smell of garlic, lime, cilantro, mint, and fish sauce wafting over me each time I raise the lid.

The Cape

Lisa and I took the dogs, hopped in the car, and drove to Cape Cod today. It took a while to get going, and ended up taking about three hours from the time we left the house until we got to the Cape Cod National Seashore. We had a good time romping with the dogs—Joy ended up getting closet to the surf of any of us, getting soaked with a sudden wave, but everyone had a great time. We’re looking forward to just soaking in the relaxation this weekend. I think.

On two wheels with Chris Reeder

I got an out of the blue email from Chris Reeder, who was one of the editors of the Yellow Journal (the scurrilous humor mag at the University of Virginia) when I was a young first year too timid and serious to contribute much but a little paste-up. (Aside: I use the term “editor” advisedly. In my yellowing copies from that year, he is varyingly credited as “First Mate” and “Voice of the Hamster.” So who the hell knows?) As coincidence goes, this was a pretty big one: turns out he’s in Boston, finishing up his MBA at Boston College.

I’m looking forward to meeting him again—I haven’t seen in in a baker’s dozen of years—and also to finishing his travel narrative, which is published online (semi-conveniently) in 101 RTF files as “My Life on Two Wheels” at his personal site. I’m currently up to chapter 24 and already feeling confirmed in my own personal journey.