Is this just too cool or what?
New Brew
I decided to try something a tad different in my search for a decent, low-cost hard apple cider recipe. Less than $10 for 3 gallons.
–9 “cans” of frozen apple juice (cos where am I going to get cider apples this time of year?) with water to make up only 7 of the cans, for a more “apple-y” flavor.
–3 cups plain ole cane sugar
–4 sticks cinnamon, broken up
–2 cloves
–1 packet of Red Star Premier Cuvee wine yeast (started ahead of time in about 1C of warm cider)
Bring almost to boil and let it simmer a while. Cool to about 105F. Transfer to fermenting bucket (with airlock). Toss the yeast.
I’ll let it go for about a week before I sample a bit. Then, may let it go a week or two longer, depending on how that goes. Transfer to a secondary fermentation bucket and let that sit a week or so, then bottle with a little starter. If this turns out half as well as the last batch, which had a lower apple-to-water ratio, I’ll be pleased.
Fermenting it in a (well-cleaned :-)) kitty litter plastic bucket, modified with a spout near the bottom edge and an air lock. Keeping the brew at about 75-80F.
Thinking of some of this as part of a wedding present, but only some.
“[D]rink… provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance… “–The Scottish Play, somewhere in Act II, I think.
🙂
12 Days and Then Some…
For Dog Lovers at Halloween
Walking Ears Down Memory Lane
(Yeh, if you don’t like that metaphor, I’ve got worse ones. :-))
If you only remember this from The (old) Dating Game, then you are a johnnie-come-lately, not nearly “olde pharte-ish” enough. *heh*
Gotta love the album cover, eh?
Ah, here’s another, just for the sheer brass of it:
BTW, While I appreciate a neat lil command line script that lets me download YouTube videoa in Linux, I have to say that YouTube Downloader for Windows edges it out in functionality. Download YouTube videos, convert them to another video format or even extract the audio and save as mp3. Neat lil app. Hmmm, I need to see about installing it in Ubuntu using WINE…
Stolen Humor
I saw this at Woody’s Place and warned him I was stealing it…
Obama And The Cowboy
A cowboy from Texas attended a social function where Barack Obama was trying to gather support for his healthcare reform plan. When he discovered the cowboy was from President Bush’s town, Barack started to belittle him by talking in a southern drawl and single syllable words.
As he was doing that, he kept swatting at some flies that were buzzing around his head. The cowboy said, “Y’all havin’ some problem with them circle flies?”
Obama stopped talking and said, “Well, yes, if that’s what they’re called, but I’ve never heard of circle flies.”
“Well Sir,” the cowboy replied, “circle flies hang around ranches. They’re called circle flies because they’re almost always found circling around the back end of a horse.”
“Oh,” Obama replied as he went back to rambling. But, a moment later he stopped and bluntly asked, “Are you calling me a horse’s ass?”
“No, Sir,” the cowboy answered, “I have too much respect for the citizens of this country to call their President a horse’s ass.”
“That’s a good thing,” said Obama as he began rambling on once more.
After a long pause, the cowboy, in his best Texas drawl said, “Hard to fool them flies, though.”
Y’all be sure to head on over to Woody’s for more of his wit and wisdom, ‘K?
This Will Bring a Smile to Your Face
You will want to go on over to The Firecrackers blog and learn more. 🙂 4th-8th Grade girls from Kings Local School District in Ohio.
Here’s their 2009 performance at the US Naval Academy:
Snoots On the Line
snoot, n., a really extreme usage fanatic 1
Just today, I stumbled upon a site that tickles my English appreciation bone: Language Log (Also found here, I now see). It’ll take some time to work through the archives, but I do know where my “reading breaks” (breaks from reading books and news, that is) will be for a while. A sample:
…snoots are never scholars. At least, their snootish outpourings are never based on scholarly investigation and analysis, even if they have some scholarly credentials in other aspects of their intellectual life. The reason is simple: scholarship subordinates the self, at least temporarily, to an investigation of external fact, while the snootish posture immediately asserts the primacy of the self’s linguistic judgments. Snoots routinely invoke both the authority of tradition and the dictates of logic, but these are ex post facto rhetorical justifications, not the conclusions of a dispassionate analysis.
Oh. *sigh-smile* That excerpt has just about everything to satisfy the anti-post-literate age curmudgeon in me. *heh* I don’t even care that it issues a vague, gentle, completely unintentional indictment of some of my semi-private musings on this blog. This stuff is just really fun reading. (And I intended the amphibolous construction in that sentence. :-))
Oh, to-loo, to-lay! What frabjous fun, my beamish boys n girls!
🙂
Update: one of my very favorite bugaboos, “[just] semantics”, is dealt with briefly here.
“…As a rule of thumb, you should be suspicious whenever someone who’s not professionally involved in the study of semantic variation dismisses some difference as “(just) semantic(s)” or the like; it’s likely to be a dodge, or at least a stretching of the truth… “
Fun Cell Phone Project
Wanna go retro with your cell phone? Here’s a cool instructable on how to hook up an old telephone handset to your cell phone–and it doesn’t even involve destroying your cell phone to do it! *heh*
Adapting a Telephone Handset to a Cell Phone – More cool how to projects
(This is the kind of blogpost you have to chance getting when you come here: whatever it takes to mollify the voices in my head… And no, I’m not crazy because I have voices in my head, after all, THEY’RE the ones IN MY HEAD!!! 😉 )
Shofar, So Good
I missed this one for Rosh Hashanah 😉
*heh*