cheese it, the cops!

rural america now

like i say, my very andrew-wyethy bit of rural pa is about 50% mexican. (i'd say 'latino', except it really seems to be almost all-mex). my favorite spot out here is tania's mexican restaurant (and jewelry), down near the big canning plants in aspers. when i moved out here four years ago, it was all-mexican in staff and clientele; it was hard to order if you didn't speak spanish. one time i saw some boys in a truck drive by, flying the rebel flag, honking the whole way and flipping the bird at the place in general. also it's kind of a community center.

but it has dawned on people. man it is good; you've never had good mole, i bet. some of the staff seems to have intermarried with the anglos, and there are babies. this evening, there were a couple of different groups of mennonites in there, and quakers i recognize from meetings. there was an asian dude, as well as a bunch of folks looking all-mayan.

i don't know how trump will really play out here; you do see signs and stickers. but if we know what's good for us, we'll roll down there and tear down any wall that may arise, for this area was dying - culturally and economically - before the influx. there are many abandoned old houses and stuff; a number are being rehabbed and inhabited by mexican families with small children. i think the whole situation is paradigmatically american, actually.

it's science, bitch

oh my god. 'science' has been back and forth and up and down on coffee every ten minutes for decades. one thing i really hate is irrational people who don't accept science as the only arbiter of human belief. in this case as in so many others, rationality consists in changing your mind all the time and believing contradictions. well, believing what 'science' tells you at least requires a healthy continuous deferral to evidently arbitrary authority, which, as all obama supporters acknowledge, is the key to a future of relentless and extremely unfortunate progress, understood here as chronic confusion that makes you run around in circles.

on paula deen: i am against this thing where we crucify people for using the wrong phonemes.

fillet of rahm

i went and got a chick fil-a sandwich yesterday, not because i am opposed to gay marriage (indeed, my view is that gay marriage should be compulsory), but because the idea of mayors trying to get rid of businesses because they don't agree politically with their executives is frigging insane. 'they don't represent chicago values': just as though chicago were a collective consciousness and it happened to be rahm emmanuel's. funny how for a politician 'all of us together' means 'me.' that's the alternative to individualism, i guess.

wait didn't these obama-types just come out for gay marriage a half hour ago? now they won't do business with anyone who doesn't agree with their brand-new position, which is a fundamental part of their identities and those of all of us.

yo the place was crowded.

eat me

mark bittman: The government regulates tobacco and alcohol. Why not diet? and while we're at it, there are a lot of harmful books out there. why not? at any rate, the idea of prohibiting people from buying x, y, and z with food stamps (of course that's already in place in some respects) shows very precisely that dependency and liberty are inversely related, that a dependent population is an abject population, that a welfare state is an authoritarian state. a government that provides your food owns your body.

see, this is why public education should immediately be banned.

we take the same regulatory approach as tunisia, or we try to make it more ridiculous or simply...evil. but where are the rioters? americans have no guts. capitulation is our best thing. i can just hear your basic bureaufuck, the type you find the world over:  i'd like to help. i really would. but we have to follow the rules. i have no choice. rules are rules, etc: the high school assistant principal's approach to personal responsibility: none whatsoever. it would shock me if, for example, anyone actually took direct responsibility for having made the decision: the decision to starve the homeless, the bold opposition to extraordinary generosity. well, nobody did, but probably he was inhabiting a particular human body at the time. he's hoping that god won't be able to find him in his body to punish him eternally; he is trying hard not to exist. i wonder whether jesus had a permit when he fed the hungry with loaves and fishes. ultimately, that's probably why they strung him up. but they had no choice! rules are rules. it would be a great comfort to us if we actually had no choice, so we pretend that we don't. that is what bureaucracy is for.

Rioting to protest joblessness and other social ills has scarred numerous cities across this tiny country since Dec. 17, after a 26-year-old man with a university degree set himself on fire when police confiscated his fruits and vegetables for selling without a permit.

christ what is wrong with these people? don't they see the necessity for sensible regulation? it's a matter of public health. you can't allow unlicensed fruit. are they rioting in favor of salmonella? not only that, but the police (really, only the police) have to eat. ok so america was propping up yet another corrupt dictator. but at least we brought them some fda and the sort of permitting system that makes the difference between a civilized society and a bag of angry weasels. anyway, i guess the ron paul revolution has reached tunisia.

headline: forty salads that can kill you. and then devour your decaying corpse.

Got no dog in this fight but...

Hi, y'all. Crusader AXE here, occasional guest blogger from the Defeatists. I personally have no dog in this hunt, but find it something that Crispin would probably find enragingly amusing. The idea of not swearing in bars is intriguing -- in a lot of places you can't smoke in bars, so not swearing in bars sort of fits in with the puritanical-Mormon-Nanny-State ethos that the country is evolving toward. Next, they will turn off the big screen TVs because sports TV encourages yelling, cheering and betting in bars. Then they will forbid talking to strangers. The sole reason for going to bars will be to drink. Which will then be forbidden by the FDA because alcohol is addictive and a food. (C6-H12-O6). Commerce will be paralyzed and human life will become extinct, although ....Life is already not worth living...

so, i've been thinking about addiction, and struggling in its coils. and i've come to a conclusion: there may be profound and complex things to say about addiction, and even more memoirs to write etc.  i've said some of them myself. but essentuially the thing is incredibly simple and common as dirt. once you start, you've got a glitch that will keep you going, even unto death. one thing addiction does seem to do is challenge the notion of natural selection: that so many of us have the self-destructo switch would seem to be incompatible with our eventual evolutionary victory, but addicts keep reproducing. not that you can't tell some kind of darwinian story, but it's not going to a plausible story unless you figure a priori that there has to be a story, and the only question is which. at any rate, i think that evolution is likely a far less systematic process than we might think, that organisms at any given stage are a huge mess of aspects, some of which help and some of which drag you toward extinction.

don't forget to check out my new book: cretins in heat: a history of the american party.

kill babies. keel them. so that we may save adults. embryos are superior to you and me in that they have committed fewer sins. and yet we must keeeel them, in the name of medical research.

the smart longterm money, however, is on beer.

the cure

you may be interested to know that semen cures depression.

never,

never forget that beer kills.

ok i just took a few hits off the worst beer i ever tasted: magic hat #9. probably - just spitballing here - you shouldn't make a flat bitter out of carrot juice. the web site has a certain appropriateness: interesting but impossible to navigate. anyway, the last time i poured a beer down the sink was probably when i swore off in 1990.

i heard a touching tribute to the brilliance of benedict 16, nee ratzinger, on cnn today. apparently he once delivered a memorable extemporaneous homily on the religious importance of beer . i was hoping for the appointment of a promiscuous, pro-choice female pope. but i guess we'll have our beer to get us through yet another papacy. 

now that  oughtta bring me some hits.

so i'm still adding stouts. been a good weekend.

guide to stouts

dogfish head chicory stout (5.2% abv): a really excellent balanced basic stout, with a smooth mocha undertone. this is why you shouldn't drink guiness.

dogfish head worldwide stout (18% abv):  it's the holy grail, which might explain why i'm writing in sentence fragments. it is good. but you really oughtn't to try drink it like a beer. think guiness without any water: dry as powder in the aftertaste, with all kinds of stuff goin on in the head: beautiful almost black brew. to be honest, i have never liked any beer more.

guiness draught: the device in the can - whatever it is - has an insane effect, producing an endless cream head that looks like some kind of volcanic op-art as it flows in its perpetual motion/stillness (deep shit, huh?) but i gotta say it's a far better visual than gastronomic experience: it's like stout floating on water: the stout attack gives way immediately to...nothing. it's "lite" stout, and is course the only thing you can get at most places in rural pa.

left hand milk stout (5.2 abv). "milk" or "cream" stout is sweeter than straight, though not through the auspices of malt. this here's one of the better american stouts, though not enough alcohol. that's representative of its lighter touch and gulpability, though. and still it's chocaltey and bitter enough. better head than most american stouts. i'll have to get hold of their imperial.

north coast old rasputin imperial russian stout (8.9% abv). i've been drinking a lot of stout lately for some reason. but  my favorite at the moment is this old rasputin. very strong, hoppy, with that traditional hint of chocolate etc. not as dry as the dogfish head world wide, but not all that wet either. to me, a good basic version of what a stout should be. judging from its effects on my head, i have a feeling that 8.9% is lowballing.

rogue imperial stout (26 degrees plato). strong and extremely malty and extremely expensive stout. to me it would have to do more to justify 5 bucks a bottle. it's certainly nowhere near the dogfish head worldwide etc. on the other hand it doesn't give up late and  always with a stout you're wondering if you have it at the right moment: thery need to age.

samuel smith's imperial stout: a lovely strong stout, a trifle malty for my taste, but bristling with british: it practically tastes like a pub (i've never really eaten a pub, but i lived a year in london, writing rock crit in the early eighties). really, i had a full-physiological flashback when i gulped. all low notes, like a stout should be. creamy head by purely natural means: this sort of craft is gathered over centuries, not decades. oh and one of the great bottles/labels in the biz. "contractor to her majesty's forces": her majesty's forces are fortunate lads.

troegs oatmeal stout (abv 6.8). this surprised me a bit: pretty uncompromising with straight-up hops bitterness, yet melting in the aftertaste to the trad chocolate notes etc. nice creamy brown head. much drier than many of these stouts. better too. troegs is close to me in harrisburg, pa, and every time i drink something i think again: yo these people are pretty good. there's an oomlaut over the o.

victory storm king imperial stout (abv 9.1%). well now. anything victory (out of downigntown pa) makes is worth taking a gulp of. this is quite a massive stout: deep and lovely and straightup at front, giving way to considerable balance and complexity. odd little notes of coffee and chocolate: odd because it tasted a bit raw to begin with. again violates my prejudice against malt, but makes it make sense with many other approaches.

weyerbacher heresy imperial stout (abv 8%). maybe i shouldn't have tried this just after the samuel smith. it's not as good in any dimension, though it's true that the oak whiskey barrel conditioning gives dry notes and hint of scotch. but it seems raw to me, unsubtle. i guess maybe there's a limit to the subtlety you want in a stout, and i'm not saying it's undrinkable (though it's too malty), just that faced with a fridge full of stouts i'd pull it out last but the guiness.

young's double chocolate stout. young's operates a london brewery that has been brewing ale since 1581. it shows. this is kind of an insane recipe, with dark chocalate, chocolate essence, and an addition of chocolate bars (really?). it tastes like, um, chocolate and is the same color. but it's remarkably drinkable: underneath the choc is a more than excellent stout, beautifully balanced with an almost light touch. the chocolate overwhelms all subtleties, though. one lesson i'm learning is that the best stouts come from the british isles: the only remotely comparable american mini-brew i've had so far is the old rasputin. did i mention the head? like sea foam: uneven, with tiny tiny components bubbles.

i'm gonna break off stouts from the extreme beer guide and eventually have a pair. but meanwhile this:

samuel smith's imperial stout: a lovely strong stout, a trifle malty for my taste, but bristling with british: it practically tastes like a pub (i've never really eaten a pub, but i lived a year in london, writing rock crit in the early eighties). really, i had a full-physiological flashback when i gulped. all low notes, like a stout should be. creamy head by purely natural means: this sort of craft is gathered over centuries, not decades. oh and one of the great bottles/labels in the biz. "contractor to her majesty's forces": her majesty's forces are fortunate lads.

x beer contd

i've added three brews to the extreme beer guide .

suicide me

i've figured out this mysterious thing about how anti-depressants cause suicide. it ain't bio-chemical. it's just that, when they tell you that you need anti-depressants, they're telling you you're depressed. now that's depressing, even moreso because the solution is that you need to be fixed with a pill. depression is bad. but depression about the fact that you are depressed is an infinite vortex of hellfire. now on the other hand maybe you weren't depressed and have been misdiagnosed. still, the claim that you are depressed makes you unhappy, and you eat the cobain stick. all of this is tripled because - because you are on anti-depressants - you expect your depression to lift, but - because you are on anti-depressants (see above) - you're all bummed out. this makes it appear that there's no solution, and so you hit the marilyn highway.

beer god

thanks, adam, for drawing my attention to the rich relation of beer to religion and the patron saints of ale.

ok. caffeinated bud, known as "b to the e" (e = extra). speedballs for football fans. this piece would have been funnier if carlson had completely played it straight, perhaps pointing to the etymology of the x to the y form: hip hop lingo circa 1994. meanwhile you have to love the way advertising execs talk: "It's beer with something extra," says Dawn Roepke, Anheuser-Busch's brand manager for new products. "It's new, it's innovative, it's different." 

"It has an aroma of blackberry and a little bit of cherry, which is unexpected," says Nathaniel Davis, the brew master who created B{+E}. "It has typical beer flavors, like hops and malt, and it finishes with what we're calling the wow factor."

 

What's the wow factor?

 

    

"That bright, slightly sweet tart finish," he says. "People who drink it, their eyes light up and they say 'Wow!,' among other things.

ok i'm coalescing all info on extreme beer here .

extreme beer: the guide

strong ales and ipa's

dogfish head 120 minute ipa (abv 21% or more): yipes! i paid like fifteen bucks a bottle! there was definitely a lot of alcohol, but i was extremely disappointed because i am a dogfish headhead. it tasted more like some kind of cloying honey liqueur than an ipa. it was the 2003 vintage and maybe was way too old or something? but anyway, i could taste hops in the background but it actually left my lips sticky even as it rendered me incoherent.

hair of the dog brewery, "fred" (10% abv): truly a beautiful ale: copper-red with an amazing foamy head, that persists like sea-foam after the tide has receded. very hoppy, but also with significant malt, it is remarkably balanced and way, way tasty. i wish really great beer wasn't so expensive, though.

lagunita's , "brown shugga" (9.9% abv) it's a lovely brown ale, and aptly named: the sweetest beer i ever had. still, it's beer. and it's also hoppy. ("we believe this special ale is something unique. feeding brown cane sugar to otherwise cultured brewery yeast is akin to feeding raw shark to your gerbil. it is unlikely ever to occur in nature"). the website is funny. and if i can figure out how, i'm gonna try to sample everything they make, from ipa (my basic style) to censored ale etc.

rogue brutal bitter (15 degrees plato): actually seems like an ipa, though a bit deeper. this is a very nice strong ale, british style, with just a hint of mysterious undertones. currently my standard brew.

rogue dead guy ale (16 degrees plato: whatever that means, pretty strong i think): rogue out of oregon has one of the biggest and most accomplished beer selections of any american small brewery. this is a kind of straightforward and fundamental strong ale with lovely color and head. way hoppy.

troegs  troegenator double bock (abv 8.6). just a firm, excellent piece of beer. gentle but still beautiful: lighter and redder than a double bock would usually be. but also pretty subtle and sweet. here i can deal with the malt because the whole thing is perfectly balanced. it's beginning to occur to me that these people from harrisburg can make beer.

 

Barley Wines:

One way barley wine is made is by freezing beer and removing the ice. You can do this with
budweiser, actually, but you’d rather at least do it with a decent ale, though it will be flat when
you’re done.. Anyway, to me drinking inextreme beer is a bit ridiculous: calories-to-alcohol ratio will bloat you and keep you sober simultaneously.

anchor “Old Foghorn” (abv 8.8): course I’d add a few percentage points. But then maybe i
couldn’t have a perfect ale: exquisitely balanced between hops and malt (at least for me: I’m a
hophead), tremendously complex in a way that defies my descriptions (sadly, I’m no real winer or
gourmand), with a perfect red color and perfect ale head. It comes in little bottles that are cute. it
tastes like a perfect british ale but *strong.* what they’re drinking this year in the elysian fields. 10

brooklyn brewery  “Monster Ale” (abv 10.8): first off, the most reasonably priced barley wine
I’ve run across. Malty and sweet and deep - almost chocalatey (a bit much for my taste). Beautiful
brown-red color with a nice english-ale style head. Long malt-syrup aftertaste. 6

dogfish head “Old School” (abv 15%): the highest alcohol ale I’ve ever run across, though
dogfish head themselves advertise a more-like 20% “worldwide stout” (see guide to stouts ) , while sam adams markets “utopia” in tiny brass bottles at, um, 25%, which makes it hard liquor.
But old school is damn good: it comes on with some alcohol, but finishes like just a good,
reasonably-balanced ale. more hoppy than traditional barley wines. why doesn’t every brewery
make a 15%? (or a 15% lite?) anyway, i actually like all the dogfish head products: every one is a
very definite example of what it is. 8.5

flying dog “Horn Dog” (abv 10.5%) a cloudy brown ale with no head. Similar to the weyerbacher
with just a little more hops, though they themselves describe it as maximum malt. Raw. But then
again barley wine can age and maybe this is young. 7.5

sierra nevada "bigfoot" (abv 9.6%): an amazing-looking thing: red and lovely. tastes...interesting: very citrusy. i would like a straighter-up ale if i was choosing but i can taste that this is well and intensely-made and very unusual.

weyerbacher “Blithering Idiot”  (abv:11.1): a completely maximalist ale from pa. as much hops,
malt, and alcohol as you could jam into the bottle. maybe this could “mature” i guess or at least get
more integrated. Cloudy red-brown, strong, strong. Anyway, whatever i may say, i enjoyed
drinking it, and if it weren’t insane I’d call it pretty well balanced.  7

there really are superheroes

at the foundation of the venerable tradition of the superhero is the "origin" story, where spidey gets bit by a radioactive spider, or whatever. but there really are superheroes, and their radioactive spiders are pcp. according to hernando today  (fl) , rudolph jesse hicks was tasered (5 times), pepper-sprayed point-blank, and ripped at by a police dog, but sufferend no ill effects.

The deputy drove his Taser into Hicks' left buttocks and stunned him for five seconds, but the man wasn't fazed. He turned and pushed the deputy to the ground.
Hicks then walked towards the deputy and Taylor fired a Taser shot at Hicks, who ripped the probes out. Taylor fired a full can of pepper spray into Hicks' eyes and. Deputy Tippin fired a Taser shot into Hicks' back. Neither affected Hicks and he ripped the wires out from the second Taser shot.
Hicks ran north on Peach Street. Deputies caught up to Hicks and Taylor fired another Taser into Hicks' back.
He kept running.
Deputies fired a third and fourth time, but Hicks ran into Hale Oaks Apartments.
When he reached the apartments, deputies unleashed a K-9 dog on him. The dog bit down on Hicks' right calf, but the dog loosened for half a second and Hicks ran once again

hicks "mighht" have been smoking dust. he couldn't remember. an important rule of thumb for aspiring caped crusaders: if you're not sure whether you got dusted, you did. truly, if you want to fight crime and evil wherever it may rear its hideous head, i suggest you stay smoked on dust at all times, ready always to swing into action.