Friday, December 28, 2007

How to Prepare Absinthe

Per Trixie's request, I will explain briefly how to prepare absinthe in the traditional manner. Be warned: no matter how much you like licorice, nothing will prepare you for your first glass of absinthe. This liquor may be as much as 80% alcohol. Enjoy conservatively.

You will need
Absinthe (available from fine U.S. distributors and from more than one bottler)
A perforated spoon, a dripper, or brouilleur
A drinking glass
A 1 ounce shot glass or a willingness to estimate
A sugar cube
Ice-cold water


Pour 1 oz of absinthe into the drinking glass. Place your absinthe spoon atop the glass and place the sugar cube atop this spoon. Slowly drip 3 to 5 oz cold water over the sugar to dissolve it into the absinthe. (Some purist absintheurs abstain the spoon and sugar.) The water will cause the absinthe to louche, releasing the essential oils therein and becoming opaque - a milky yellowish green.

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Rats!

That's all. I just thought that this was a cute picture. I'm trying out Google's news reader and it brought me here, to File magazine.

Reading Level

cash advance

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Kajukenbo

Since I haven't had time to train, I've really missed my twice weekly martial arts sessions. I hope to get together with my teacher again before I have to go back to work. In the meantime, I've been watching and rewatching this short video demonstration of Kajukenbo techniques.

Eerie silence

Several posts back, I turned on comments again.

I realized that there were two reasons I haven't been blogging.

I haven't had time.

I find the blog more satisfying when others read and comment on it.

My students don't read this blog, or even know about it.

My colleagues don't read it.

I write what I want.

I look forward to reading your retorts. . .

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Yule Absinthe

I so wanted to share this with you before now since I've been bursting to share - I bought Shel a bottle of absinthe for Yule and gave it to her today. She was completely surprised.
Long thought to be illegal in the U.S., absinthe is 124 proof liquor distilled from Grand Wormwood, anise, and other herbs. Mistakenly believed to be a poisonous hallucinogen, absinthe is a distinctive drink with an elaborate ritual in its consumption. Playing on Shel's belief that absinthe was illegal, I managed to keep this one a complete secret. I gave her a package of half-a-dozen absinthe spoons first, and she instantly recognized them, compounding her puzzlement. When she pulled out the bottle, she asked how I had gotten it - given that it was illegal.
Interested in a bottle of your own? Check out the Lucid website, or that of BevMo, which sells both Lucid and another brand of absinthe, KΓΌbler.

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Neat Site

I found this neat site through an advertisement - though, come to think of it, that was a pretty poorly targeted ad, given that I was looking up the meaning of the word moue and an etymology for exacerbate. The site is called Black Jungle and they sell carnivorous plants, terrarium and vivarium supplies, and pretty, oxymoronically non-poisonous poison-dart frogs.

I Should be Working

I should be working, but I'm not.
I have papers to grade - what a chore.
Niacin flush makes my skin hot.

Powerpoint learning a little more,
But mostly just surfing instead.
I did find a site I adore.

Called Blogger Play, it is said
To have photos from all over.
And they quickly fill my head.

Gods, that's bad!

Anyway, neat site linked above. I'm turning comments back on and killing the link that points here from my school web page.

Back to work. 130 essays, 38 hours, 0 time to sleep.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

I'm a new man

I retook the personality profile test at MyPersonality.info and this time, I got different results.Click to view my Personality Profile pageTruth be told, I actually took the test twice and both sets of results were different from each other and from the original results. I think most folks' Myers-Briggs results are pretty consistent. I guess I'm just weird.

Saturday, December 1, 2007

Coolest Advent Ever!

Yes, I'm blogging at 5:30 in the morning.

I got up to feed the dogs and discovered what Shel has been hinting at for weeks. She made me an Advent calender! This is the coolest thing ever, and I am very excited.

I love Advent. I always have. (Yes, it's a Christian tradition, and perhaps in its relative obscurity, should be regarded as even "more Christian" than Christmas - if Christianity is a sliding scale.) The anticipation of that which is to come is heightened by the gradual parceling out of goodies. I grew up with the little chocolate-filled paper advent calenders and, once or twice had calenders without candy but with carefully-placed doors which opened to reveal nativity scenes. When I heard about Suzanne's kid getting a Lego(r) advent calender, I felt some envy - I must confess. When Shel got annoyed at having to stop me from buying myself an Advent calender at Cost Plus International Market, I began to get excited.

As any of you who has ever received a handmade gift before know, hand-made is better by far than store-bought. No, I don't want a hand-made Tag-Heuer watch. You know what I mean. A gift assembled for you by someone who knows and loves you is really something special. This gift is a perfect example.

Shel knows I love Advent - or at least that I love Advent calenders. She knows that I prefer high-quality, durable things over disposable crap. She knows that I enjoy Lindt chocolates (Not rocket surgery, that - fish enjoy water, too. Who doesn't like Lindt?) Most of all, though, Shel knows that I have a deep and abiding nostalgia for G.I.*Joe. I spent many of the most enjoyable hours of my life playing with, posing, writing about, drawing, yearning for, talking about, arranging and rearranging, organizing, caring for, and destroying my G.I.*Joe toys and file cards. I even wrote letters to Hasbro suggesting new characters. While other kids were moving on to Michael Jackson and Tiffany and methamphetamines, I was typing file cards into the computer so I could quickly and easily select characters by their primary and secondary military specialties. When other kids were making jokes about Christa McAuliffe, I was plotting Destro's takeover of Cobra and trying to figure out how he would transform it from a terrorist organization into a profit-making enterprise. I loved me some G.I.*Joe.

This morning, I came into the den to discover the Advent calender below. I opened the door marked "1" to find Cobra Commander curled up in the fetal position inside next to a Lindt dark chocolate Lindor truffle! The fetal position!

Anyone who's ever played with G.I.*Joes knows that the old ones could never assume the fetal position and would not last long if one tried. This little guy is far better articulated than anything I played with as a kid. The sculpt is painstakingly done. The paint is almost perfect. It is too cool!

While the toy has been re-imagined to allow freer movement, the concept is the same, and the sculpt is obviously based on the same concept art that governed the creation of those toys all those years ago. Only one of the sibilant one's hands could ever hope to hold anything - the left one is curled into a fist, and his windswept hood is hard plastic rather than the fairly firm rubber or old, one can peek under this one's shroud to see some skin-tight red garment covering his neck. He still has the gig-line to make Tim Gunn cry and the silly leggings that strap under the heels of his boots, but now he also has ankle joints. Gone is the in-torso rubber band and the funky metal hip joint thing. CC now has a ball joint in his lower torso. The arms will lay flat against its sides. The sculpt is a little thin - his pants look like those skin-tight chick pants that kids wear now, but let's face it - if anybody was ever emo, it was Cobra Commander.

If I was bent on world-domination through terror and intimidation by the employment of overly-complex and needlessly public and hyper-dramatic plans that Dr. Evil himself would scoff at, I'd hope to be this cool.

COBRA!
(I think I might hire somebody to come up with a more imaginative war-cry, though)