Well It’s About Fuckin Time

www.mtvmusic.com

So this only comes half a decade late, but finally, MTV (in a move that has effectively rendered my wife single) has put their (entire?) catalog of music videos online.  In retrospect, maybe it’s a good thing this didn’t happen earlier.  I would never have been able to write a dissertation if I’d had this to distract me.  On a completely unrelated note, I just re-did all my syllabi.  I’ve decided it will be best to turn the rest of the semester over to watching the full series of Roots in all my classes.

Job Risks

Chalky Pants

I should have seen this coming…

Just so you know, what you see on television could possibly be embarrassing and hazardous to your health should you attempt to try what you’ve seen.

Take ‘The Dog Whisperer’ as an example. In the first season, Cesar takes a dog out roller blading. The dog burns off his high energy by pulling and running alongside Cesar on the suburban streets. It looks like a lot of fun, so I decided to try it.

After figuring out that I didn’t have the traction needed from two sturdy feet on the ground to correct my dog’s pulling behavior, I still attempted to roller blade around the neighborhood. We crossed a busy street and headed down a hill in the bike lane. As we picked up speed three cars decided to pass us, and wouldn’t you know it, an ambulance with its sirens blaring was coming the other way. I wrapped the leash around my left hand to keep her close, but as I picked up speed down the hill, I had to let out more of the leash. It seems as though I was going faster than she could either keep up, or she was just unsure of all the activity. Either way, she ended up crossing behind me and over to my right side, which of course knocked me off balance!

I remember thinking, “Wow! This is really cool!” as I was going down the hill. Then as she crossed behind me, and I thought, “This isn’t going to end well.” And indeed, it resulted in my feet flying out in front of me, and a landing on my backside and left wrist. I wasn’t hurt bad, and I could only laugh as the dog came over, wagging her tail, as if to say, “What are you doing? Get up!”

As I recall, Cesar didn’t roller blade with that particular dog on a hill. Now I know why.

We’re learning

It’s been almost two full weeks since I brewed my first batch of beer. I’m hoping that this batch will taste good as Seventonine plans a get together in a couple of weeks. The beer is a wheat beer, and it’s my first beer to brew by myself.

Here’s a couple of things I think everyone should know, should they plan on ever homebrewing themselves.

1) Ship your dog off somewhere for a couple of weeks. I don’t care how much fun they are to have around all of the other times a year—but when it comes to me homebrewing, my dog has become my number one nemesis. From hair, to stealing the ingredients, to chewing up some of the plastic pieces of equipment—my dog has certainly hindered the entire process. If you have a dog, ship it off somewhere for a couple of weeks while the initial process is going on, or at the very least quit storing your brewing supplies & ingredients on the kitchen counter.

2) Bigger isn’t always better. Consider the stockpot. Your fear is that while brewing, the contents will boil over onto the stove creating a sticky and stinky mess. So, you figure that you’ll outsmart the laws of physics and get a bigger stockpot, one that will have more room for the contents to boil inside. What you don’t consider is that the size of the stockpot will make it more difficult for your electric oven to heat the mixture to a boiling temperature. You try to position the pot onto part of two burners, and discover that this doesn’t really help. Then you get smart and position the lid over most of the pot, which enables the mixture to boil. Problem solved, right? Wrong. What you didn’t consider was that the stockpot won’t fit into the kitchen sink. And that’s where you planned on cooling it off with a sink full of ice water, just like the instructions advised.

3) They weren’t kidding about the hydrometer. That tool which measures the density of the liquid is evidently pretty important. It helps you to see how active the yeast is while brewing, and will help you determine when the yeast is finished doing its job. According to the books and directions, if you bottle before the yeast is finished working, your bottles could explode, which in all likelihood is a pretty bad thing. With this piece of equipment, you can diagnose any potential problems (i.e. stalled fermentation), but only if you take an initial reading after you’re done brewing. By the way, the hydrometer is not included in the basic brewmaking kit.

I’ve spent a couple of nights awake until about 3:00 AM brewing and transferring. As I’ve said, I’m hoping that this batch will turn out ok…given all of the things I’ve discovered during my first solo brewing, I’m just that—hopeful. We’ll let you know how it all turns out in a couple of weeks.

See, I told you so.

http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003872663

Distinctions I

People are throwing around a lot of accusations about who’s “qualified” to do particular jobs.  Specifically, some are suggesting that Sarah Palin is not qualified to be Vice President.  In an attempt to discredit Republicans in general and the McCain/Palin ticket in particular, these people suggest that her experience as mayor and then/now governor of Alaska does is not enough to make her a legitimate VP candidate.  But let’s be absolutely clear here about who benefits from such rhetoric-The Republicans.  That’s right, and the reason why is very, very simple.  Sarah Palin is ABSOULTELY 100% qualified to be Vice President.  Hell, Bush got elected President twice with less political experience, and certainly Clinton had only been a small state governor when he was elected (twice).  Her credentials are certainly in line with what it would take to be VP, and Republicans have done a pretty decent job of pointing that out.

The problem, however, is that she isn’t CAPABLE of being Vice President (see: Interviews w/Katie Couric).  Precision with diction is necessary here because there’s a big difference.  Being qualified does not mean that you’ll necessarily be any good at something, it simply means that you meet some arbitrary and fluctuating standards which rely mostly on precedent rather than meaningful accomplishment.  The problem is that people don’t want to point out that, rather than being unqualified, she’s incompetent.  It sounds meaner, somehow more personal, and so we would rather just use this vague “unqualified” designation.  But in reality it’s not an ill-spirited personal attack about the essence of Sarah Palin’s humanity.  It’s just true.  It doesn’t make her a bad person that she would be bad at this job, just as it doesn’t make seventonine bad people if we’re bad at our jobs (which, for the record, we’re not.  In fact, we rule-ask anyone).

Calling a spade a spade would stop letting the Republicans hide behind this veil of sexism and folksiness and charm.  Charm isn’t nearly as useful when people are focused on your ability (or lack thereof).  In fact, to continue with a popular metaphor, we’ll just let our old pals Jules and Vincent from Pulp Fiction take us home:

Vincent: Yeah, but do you consider a dog to be a filthy animal?
Jules: I wouldn’t go so far as to call a dog filthy but they’re definitely dirty. But, a dog’s got personality. Personality goes a long way.
Vincent: Ah, so by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he would cease to be a filthy animal. Is that true?
Jules: Well we’d have to be talkin’ about one charming motherfuckin’ pig. I mean he’d have to be ten times more charmin’ than that Arnold on Green Acres, you know what I’m sayin’?