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June 30, 2005

Touché

No entries for "most pretentious opening line of a blog post," yet, but a reader sends in this comment:

I can't think of a much more pretentious opener. Nerdiest opener? "As someone who brews his own mead..." and "As someone who's read through a lot of software patents..." are up there. At least when they're in consecutive entries.

Ouch! Well played.

Posted by Dean at 3:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 29, 2005

Readership Contest

Ok, in an earlier post, I declared the opening sentence of this entry of The Huffington Post to be "the most pretentious opening line of a blog post, ever."

For those of you who need an refresher, that opening line was:


I just landed at Vail airport, right next to the Vice President’s Gulfstream jet...

This may well be the most pretentious opening line in the history of blogging. However, for those of you who are reading (if any), I invite you to find a more pretentious opening line of a blog post and post it in the comments (with link). As a reward, you get a mention on the front page and my overwhelming admiration. Plus the satisfaction of a job well done (what did you expect? I'm a grad student).

Posted by Dean at 11:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 28, 2005

Fusion

Back in my younger days, I thought I wanted to be a nuclear physicist. After all, it's hard not to find the prospect of building huge nuclear reactors pretty compelling. That said, I pretty quickly learned that I wasn't going to be a physicist, and I studied computer science, instead. However, I still get excited when I read new of nuclear fusion-based reactors being planned. This is pretty cool, and in seven years, we'll see how well it does at generating usable energy.

Posted by Dean at 11:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 27, 2005

PJ O'Rourke Speaks. Dean Compelled to Comment

I grew up as a fan of PJ O'Rourke when I read Parliament of Whores. In this interview, we find an amusing pair of exchanges. First,


PRWeek: What do you think about the changing media and the way technology is affecting journalism?

O'Rourke: If you would have told me 30 years ago that journalism could get worse, I would have called you a liar. But it looks like it's headed that way. As bad as daily journalism can be, and TV journalism, all the kinds of journalism-- and they can be pretty bad-- [they're] not nearly as bad as Arianna Huffington's blog.

Ok, ha ha. I actually like Arianna Huffington, and if you've ever seen my Friendster profile, I explain how I signed up for Friendster to find out if I was connected to Arianna Huffington back when she had a profile (I was, via my cousin Johanna). That said, The Huffington Post is ridiculous. Since my comment on this metafilter post about this entry by Arianna Huffington hasn't gotten much attention, I'll repeat it here:

"I just landed at Vail airport, right next to the Vice President’s Gulfstream jet" has to be the most pretentious opening line of a blog post, ever.

Further down, however, O'Rourke comes close to the mark but misses the target in this exchange:


PRWeek: Why do you think, generally speaking, there are so few funny Republicans these days?

O'Rourke: There are a lot of funny Republicans, it's just, are we talking intentional? I don't know, I think because there's something about show business. Being funny has a lot to do with-- it's a kind of show business. There's a lot to do with show business, a lot of easy audience pleasing, if you're going to be successful at it. And that works better with liberal philosophy, because you just sound so sympathetic. Whereas a conservative is always standing back saying, "Wait a minute, I want to cure AIDS too, but I'm not sure that dropping condoms from an airplane over the Congo is gonna do that." So you're always backing away and saying "Well, but, I'm not sure, past history would tell us..." It just doesn't have the warm and fuzzies...


Yes, he gets it right that at issue is the interviewer is discussing intentionally funny Republicans, which makes the question more difficult, (there are certainly plenty of moments of unintentional humor) but he doesn't quite hit on why. You see, while certainly a liberal comedian is going to find the inherent humor in airdropping a planeload of condoms into the Congo (heck, who doesn't? You can't go wrong with condom jokes), a conservative is going to find it oh-so-hilarious to talk about how funny it is that a bunch of Congolese are dying of AIDS when death squads aren't already cannibilizing them. Because, you know, nothing's funnier than stuff like that. I mean, sure, if you think it's funny to make fun of poor people, more power to you. It just doesn't work. Dennis Miller tried to cross over with poor results. So PJ O'Rourke remains the shining exception of conservative humor. The only explanations I can come up with are that he started out as a good writer in the first place, and he never got hung up on the mindless hero-worship of many other conservatives that doesn't lend itself to fostering a sense of humor. It's hard to be funny when you make stuff like this. If you have a good sense of humor, this seems like the obvious creation.

Posted by Dean at 10:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 26, 2005

How a wort becomes a beer

As someone who brews his own mead, I found this explanation of the mechanism and evolution of alcohol synthesis to be pretty interesting. My interest in mead-making came from the difficulty in finding anyone that sold mead in my local liquor stores, so I figured that I could have all the mead I wanted if I made my own. The web pages I used as my guide are long since gone (though the guide is available on archive.org). However, this active guide to mead making is also pretty good.

My last batch of mead was a ginger-cinnamon-spiced wine, where, for a 1-gallon batch, I added 6 oz. of ginger and about 10 small cinnamon sticks to the simmering mixture before fermenting it with some white-wine yeast... I kept it fermenting in a carboy underneath my sink for 3 months and bottled it up. I keep the bottles in a cool dark place and taken one out every so often for special occasions. The next project: Ethiopian-style honey wine, which requires that I acquire about 1/3 - 1/2 pound of gesho leaves (Ethiopian hops) for a 5-gallon batch.

Posted by Dean at 4:02 PM | Comments (0)

June 21, 2005

Richard Stallman on Software Patents

As someone who's read through a lot of software patents, I have seen how their absurdity can be stunning. Richard Stallman, of the Free Software Foundation writes on Patent absurdity in The Guardian.

Posted by Dean at 10:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 18, 2005

Imminent Death of Rock Predicted

Today's article in Salon Magazine poking fun of Coldplay's Chris Martin for cozying up to Tony Blair, because, you know, what kind of music is so earnest as to think Tony Blair is cool? Coldplay got pegged as the most insufferable band of the decade, recently (full article), which means we've finally, after many years, hit the full-tilt backlash against the "whiner rock" that has plagued us since the early 1990s.

But, anyway, the above-mentioned Salon article points out the problem thusly:

...listening to Coldplay's new album "X&Y" is a lot like listening to a speech by Tony Blair: You're made to believe that you are hearing something Big and Important, but scratch the surface and there is very little heart or soul underneath. When he's giving a public speech, Blair's theatrical glottal stops and pained expressions say, "Listen to me, I'm saying something profound!" as do the epic guitar riffs and Martin's earnest vocalizing on "X&Y." But both Blair's and Coldplay's performances feel too forced and formulaic to be taken seriously: Blair in public-speaking mode comes across as an actor trying too hard to please, while Martin and Co. seem to have written their latest Big Tunes by rote, conspiring to get the audience waving our lighters in the air whether we want to or not.

This, in fact, reminds me of an article from Reason Magazine on the death of rock(tm) as a countercultural phenomenon which I wrote about in my old reading journal (scroll down to June 28, 2002). To whit:

more precisely, the death of rock's pretensions to Dionysian excess and subversive power, once widely understood to be its very raison d'etre... As Frank Sinatra memorably put it in 1957, rock "is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons. By means of its almost imbecilic reiteration it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth." Exactly. And therein lies its great and enduring appeal...

[R]ock itself, which after more than five decades now ... so endlessly gestures toward maturity and responsibility that you almost suspect rockers to be suffering from repetitive-stress injuries. Is there anything more appalling than the sight of dried-out rock stars ranging from Alice Cooper to Steven Tyler extolling the virtues of booze-free living like so many reformed drunks testifying at a 19th-century temperance revival meeting? As if fans had ever looked to rock stars for role models rather than vicarious thrills.

See, I was picking up on this stuff ages ago. :)

On related music musings, I came across the Punk Goes 80s compilation from Fearless Records, today. Well worth it, if only for So They Say's rendition of Forever Young.

Posted by Dean at 6:13 PM | Comments (0)

June 14, 2005

I am Constantine Christakos

After googling myself using my given name, I realized that I am not the first result on Google, unlike when I use my nickname. Instead, the first result that comes up is that of my doppelganger, John Aniston, who played the character of Constantine Christakos on the final episode of My Big Fat Greek Life. How they came up with that name, I have no idea.

Posted by Dean at 9:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 12, 2005

A more successful attempt

Ok, after my last failed attempt at making chili, I spent Saturday trying another recipe that I got from this list of chili recipes. I tried the "A Bowl of Red" recipe, which is distinctive for its use of bacon, bitter chocolate and no tomatoes or tomato paste. That said, I came home to find that I only had beef broth, not beef stock, as the recipe required. It turns out that there is a difference between beef stock and beef broth. However, it all actually turned out pretty well, and my meals seem to be taken care of for the rest of the week. The only drawback seems to be the excessive spiciness of my chili powder, which I bought from the local Indian food store and dominates all of the other tastes.

Full recipe after the jump...

Continue reading "A more successful attempt"

Posted by Dean at 11:56 PM | Comments (1)

June 2, 2005

Deep Throat Spills It

From The Daily Show:

JS: So, the truth is, in your mind, the truth is the media couldn't break Watergate today.

SC: That's right John, it just no longer has the credibility.

JS: The media.

SC: No, the truth.

This is true. Ever since it the facts in Iraq were assailed for having an anti-Bush agenda, the truth hasn't been of much interest.

Ok, in reality, I'm loving the bad puns that come out of this... in the comments of a weblog, we get "FELT DEEP THROAT? HARD TO SWALLOW." The Boston Herald as a strange juxtaposition to go along with its "Deep Throat Coughs It Up" headline.

All right, really, let me explain why I find this entertaining. If you were of my grandparents' generation, you saw Nixon go from the guy who exposed Alger Hiss to Vice President of the USA. If you were of my parents' generation, you saw Nixon go from the guy who lost to JFK to the guy who, like a zombie, kept coming back and became the president responsible for everything bad that happened in the early 70s. I, on the other hand, missed all of this. Instead, growing up in the 1980s, I saw Nixon go from being the disgraced former president to becoming the distinguished elder statesman. Suddenly this guy, who was supposed to stay in his hole, was out giving advice about foreign policy to all who would listen. So now, I think it's good to have a reminder of why Nixon was down in his hole in the first place. Deep Throat stayed underground for long enough. He outlasted Nixon, waited until the guy who pardoned him had passed on, and we had entered an era in which anonymous sources were being considered sketchy. The only drawback is that I have to hear about G. Gordon Liddy, again, rising with moral indignation that someone leaked to the press that he was doing something illegal.

Posted by Dean at 11:31 AM | Comments (0)