Author: David

Over-educated Curmudgeon, Bit-Bucket Tuner and Budding Brewmeister.
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Strange Brew

Finally, about 3 weeks ago, I pulled a batch of beer from a fermenting tub that was… strange. No, really strange. The sample I decanted from near the bottom (but above the trub) seemed OK, but for the first time there was some very ugly black scum floating on top and crawling up the sides, trying to escape into the wild. Did not like the looks of it, so…

Decanted all I could w/o involving the scum directly, filtered it well and then boiled what I got (only about 2 gallons that I was willing to play with)… for a while. I then used THAT liquid as a base for a whole new batch that I just now bottled for conditioning. It took a longer time to come together than previous primary fermenting stages on other brews, but I tasted some (mostly flat, of course, before the bottle conditioning), and… it’s surprisingly good, even uncarbonated! I bottled one bottle as is with no sugar charge for use cooking and the rest in 16-oz Grolsch swingtops. I’m really looking forward to this one.

Now, on to an(other *heh*) experimental batch. Since I’m low on hops, I think I’ll make the next batch some molasses “beer” using the trub off this for whatever “hopsiness” is available. The yeast in the trub will boil to nothing but some dead, mostly protein, additional flavoring, and I’ll likely be at least better-pleased than if I had to use only the hops on hand.

Should be fun.

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En Passant…

Innocence might be bliss, but ignorance is hell. Or at least hellish. Witness the fix ignorant (and lazy and stupid and greedy and corrupt) voters have landed the U.S. in over decades of (nearly effortless *sigh*) “effort” to prove that,

“In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history are in the majority and dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance.”-third world county’s corollary to Santayana’s Axiom

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About That Halloween Thing…

Our children never really did much Halloween stuff. Our choice, but they didn’t suffer for it, as we made sure they had other opportunities to wear fun costumes, go to parties and gorge on candy. And we made sure, when they were older and not engaged in other parties/gorging on Halloween, that we had plenty of candy available to give out to the greedy lil waifs who came to our door, until…

Our final participation in the annual shakedown was when kids became coming by and demanding their extortion candy so rudely that we simply rebelled at supporting such barbaric behavior any more. “Give it to me!” delivered rudely by a little “girl” (apprentice Dhimmicrap, more like) in a princess outfit wasn’t the last straw, but it was one of the more memorable ones.

Nope. Not going there again. They can find someone(s) else to give them sugar highs and expand their parents’ dental bills.

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Old News from Afghanistan?

Well, maybe time-lagged information, another confirmation, but scarcely “news” for those of us who’ve been paying attention to Dhimmicrappic treatment of Islamic savages. From this article,

“One video, captured recently by the thermal-imagery technology housed in a sniper rifle, shows two Talibs in southern Afghanistan engaged in intimate relations with a donkey.”

I didn’t know the Democratic Leadership had taken a tour of Afghanistan, until now…

Of course, the following sentence confirmed that one leading Dhimmicrap–Nancy Pelosi, from the sound of it–was there:

“Similar videos abound, including ground-surveillance footage that records a Talib fighter gratifying himself with a cow.”

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Submitted for Your Approval

The president has a “theme song”–“Hail to the Chief” (ironically appropriate for our Kenyan (?) ‘p-resident’)–but what to play when The Zero, Nazi Pelosi and Not-So-Hairy Reid appear together? Allow me to suggest,

[audio:Three-Stooges-Theme.mp3]

But enough of this serious commentary. I now return twc to our irregularly unscheduled curmudgeonry.

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A Trifling Tidbit

…if that’s not entirely redundant. 😉

For a long time now, I’ve chosen passwords based on a topic-subtopic-specific, misspelled and then with added characters and numerals and upper/lowercase letters interspersed to make a word (preferably longer than 12 letters) or phrase sort-of-halfway-kinda resemble the original word or phrase in a manner that’s memorable to me.

Recently, though, somehow my gmail account became vulnerable despite what several online password checkers from reputable companies thought was a “strong password” so…

I’ve begun changing my passwords again, this time using lyrics to songs I know–some that are even “semi-unpublished” *heh*

Here’s the trick:

Write out (if you’re a little unsure of the lyrics) the lyrics to a song–the older and less likely to be common knowledge among the illiterati the better. Now, select the first letter of each word of the first (or second or third… ) verse. Assemble those into your “rough sketch” for a password. Now, in some way that makes sense to you–all the letters from the first half of the alphabet, all vowels, all “voiced” consonants, etc.–capitalize some of the letters. Substitute numbers for other letters. Add characters like “@!%#” at places within the string of letters in ways that make some loose sense to you.

I recently changed out my first (of more than a few) email passwords with a 40-character password devised this way. Yes, I have my passwords saved on hardcopy in place that’s accessible to family only, and yes I have them saved in an encrypted, password-protected zipped text file.

It’s not all that hard, and it beats putting your birth date or wedding anniversary on a sticky note slapped on your monitor… *heh* By quite a lil bit.

Oh, my computers’ passwords are considerably less complex, because

  1. They’re in a fairly secure environment and
  2. Anyone wanting to crack ’em can probably do so with Ophcrack or other tools, anyway.
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More Evidence Suggesting That Even Reading News Can Make One Stupid

From an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article in 2009 that I ran across looking for something else,

“Sometimes called the ‘silent epidemic’ because it can manifest itself in a victim for decades without showing any symptoms, hepatitis C has become better known publicly in recent years.”

Oh, really?

man·i·fest
[man-uh-fest]
–adjective
1. readily perceived by the eye or the understanding; evident; obvious; apparent; plain: a manifest error. . .

–verb (used with object)
3. to make clear or evident to the eye or the understanding; show plainly: He manifested his approval with a hearty laugh.
4. to prove; put beyond doubt or question: The evidence manifests the guilt of the defendant. . .

—Synonyms
1. clear, distinct, unmistakable, patent, open, palpable, visible, conspicuous. 3. reveal, disclose, evince, evidence, demonstrate, declare, express. See display.

—Antonyms
1. obscure. 3. conceal.

A thing cannot be “manifest” while not “showing any symptoms”. It’s just not possible. What the idiot who wrote the sentence above apparently meant was something like, “Sometimes called the ‘silent epidemic’ because it can remain hidden in a victim for decades without showing any symptoms,” but that’s an unnecessarily cumbersome and excessively wordy way of saying simply, “Sometimes called the ‘silent epidemic’ because those infected often show no symptoms for decades. . .”

But, of course, the subliterate idiot who wrote the article (and his editor) apparently don’t know the meanings of the words they use, so they “misunderedumacate” their (also likely subliterate) readers.

And no, it’s not comforting to know that major newsrags are populated with “reporters” who are no more literate than those who write for America’s Third World County’s weekly birdcage liner.

With crooks like this (yeh, taking pay as a wordsmith for subliterate screeds is theft, IMO) populating so-called journalism–and they’re prevalent in all the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind–such crap polluting public discourse seems designed to bring literacy down to the lowest common denominator. And that feeds right in to my blog’s header quote…