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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decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


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(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   Charlottesville picobrewery
Sunday, December 22 1996 Soon after getting up, I started warming the Dart. An obnoxiously loud black guy and two even more obnoxious, even louder white female companions were walking west on Wertland. I was embarrassed as the two girls kept trying to "out black" one another by making gratuitous and ever louder uses of such phrases as "You go, girlfriend" with their nasal white girl accents.

With a vodka and horrible-simulated-juice cocktail loaded in my handy ketchup bottle (much of my orange juice having been pilfered by housemate John and some random girl), I drove the Dart to the residence of Nathan VanHooser. The mission: to brew a batch of beer, something Nathan has made stabs at doing, but never unassisted at his house. I'm using the word "unassisted" to describe his effort today, even though I was there and did a few little things to help. But this time no one in the know was holding his hand.

The brewing of beer is a remarkably simple process. It involves lots of water mixed with malt and sugar, boiled with a big tea bag of hops, cooled quickly to 30 degrees Celsius, an addition of yeast, and then the fermentation begins. The only thing that must be feared is contamination with other biologic agents.

I'd bought some Oregon Micro-brew (sorry, I don't recall the name of the stuff) to get us in the mood.


You have a chair
go sit in it sir
You have a stair
go climb it Sarah

Rational in working
Pleasant in speaking
Evil in knowing
and turning and going
We break tools fixing
what isn't ailing

I am a child in
a field made of failings
I am small
And fenced in by railings
Go kiss the flower
I'm guessing she loves you


As we worked, or as Nathan worked, we discussed issues of the day. All seems to be going well with him and Janine since their marriage. He'll be joining her in her native Ohio in a few days. She's there already, and so for a change we were free to discuss things without the presence of girls. Nathan always makes a point of being interested in my romantic life, not so much in my present lack of one, but in my prospects for a future one. He coaxes from me the prospective suitors and we discuss their positives and negatives. Some are too clean and tidy for me. Some might be shocked by my sociopathy. Some probably have too much money and legitimate social status. Some are gorgeous but GOD AWFUL STUPID. But none are too apathetic. None are too flaky. None are too young. None are too old. None are too ugly. None are too poor. None are ruled out for being slobs. At least not in the circles in which I circulate.

zillions of species of flavoured potato chips
The crisis of this evening was a lack of corn chips. We had salsa, we had beer. But we needed corn chips. So we walked down to the Pik and Pak grocery store, the very same one I've walked to on occasion from Nemo's house coming the other way. And would you believe that they had no corn chips suitable for salsa? All they had was four different varieties of pork rinds, zillions of species of flavoured potato chips, and little sniggly Fritos-style over-salted corn chips in tiny one dollar bags. I bought one of these anyway as a stop gap measure. Nathan noted that they sold High Times right next to the cash register. That store is even wackier than I had originally thought.

I ended up driving us to the Food Lion on Pantops to get some real corn chips. Food Lion brand "salted corn chips" are the economical and not-overly-salted salsa vehicles of choice.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?961222

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