Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Like my brownhouse:
   half gallon of fermented cider
Thursday, December 6 2007 [REDACTED]

I spent most of the day working on a dynamic questionnaire system, recycling some complicated code I'd written earlier this year. As involved as my new questionnaire was, it was an order of magnitude simpler than the system whose code it was based on, and much of the work involved removing huge blocks confusing functionality that were no longer needed.

In the Fall of 1988 I was a student at Oberlin College living in a vegetarian co-op called Harkness right in the center of campus (this was the place and time that I first met my wife Gretchen). Harkness bought its food in bulk, and my morals were such that I thought nothing of transferring certain things from the bulk purchases directly into my private caches. Later on I would do this with expensive bottles of vanilla extract, which I took to sipping like whiskey, but in those days I was mostly interested in things like corn chips, cooking sherry (which I would distill into pure alcohol), cashews, and apple cider. Apple cider was a pleasant non-alcholic beverage suitable for every occasion, and it was natural that I laid up several gallons in anticipation of a Fall Break road trip to New England. In the end, though, I spaced out and forgot the cider. It spent the following week on top in the bookshelves of Harkness 201. Because of the way that room is designed, those bookshelves are directly heated by the room's steam-based heating system. When I returned, I found the room stinking of cider and those gallon jugs bloated with CO2. At first I thought the cider was lost, but then I tasted some and found it reasonably tasty and obviously rich in alcohol. I invited some friends over and we all got drunk on the stuff.
In the ensuing weeks I tried fermenting more cider, but none ever turned out as well as that first accidental batch. Oxygen contamination is a serious problem when attempting to ferment, but this apparently hadn't been a problem when gallons were nearly-sealed and the pressure inside kept oxygen from getting in.
My DIY spirit suffers a little every time I purchase alcohol, particularly when I have to pay state and federal excise taxes. So a couple weeks ago I decided to lay up a half gallon of apple cider and see what would become of it. To help it along, I threw a little baker's yeast in and sealed it up with a water-filled S-shaped copper pipe allowing CO2 to escape without letting air in. I put it near the baseboard hydronic heater of the laboratory, which had place it conditions similar to those of my first accidental alcohologenic miracle.
Tonight as I worked on the increasingly thankless questionnaire project, I started drinking my cider. Its flavor was unexpectedly mellow with a light bouquet of vinegar. Its flavor would have been weird but not unexpected in a beer. I couldn't see or taste any obvious signs of alcohol, but by the time I'd drunk four ounces I could feel it.
It ended up being a rather pleasant beverage to drink while programming. I felt clear-headed and alert, though a little cosier and upbeat than normal. By the time I went to bed I'd drunk the whole 64 ounces and had a mild headache.


Today's spectacle of Mitt "Double Guantanamo" Romney giving a speech about his Mormonism will go down in the annals of America's more cringeworthy moments. It would have been one thing for to Romney declare himself to be a member of a religious minority liberated and empowered by the secular wisdom of our nation's founders. But no, because his pitch is to religious kooks who seek to Christianize our society, he attacked secularism as the religion most responsible for destroying freedom, family, and the funk of the Fonz. Being a member of a minority religion he surely knows better. But that's we have to expect from someone who has cast his lot with a political party that, at this particular moment in history, holds within it the concentrated mass of all that is bigoted, ignorant, frightened, paranoid, and selfish in this country.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?071206

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