The other night Matt and I enjoyed an evening of delicious beer and good conversation with his cousin Arnie, a farmer in western Iowa. We talked of many things – capitalism, service, agro business, the promise of technology, and the virtues and vice of pecan pie verse the fur pie (I’m still not sure which I prefer most days).

One thing Arnie mentioned was this 100 day theory of a deep fog to a heavy blizzard. He claims that 100 days from a dense fog will always produce heavy moisture and, depending on your temperatures at the time, you’ll either get mighty wet or wonderfully buried.

I’ve never heard this before, and I’m not wholly convinced Arnie didn’t just make this up as a reason to sell an extended vacation in the southwest to his wife, but I’m curious enough to keep my eyes on the calendar after our deep fog here in Chicago a little over a week ago.

Imagine what a booking advantage this would be if this kind of improbable wisdom could be applied to a snowboarding vacation? I’m curious enough to run a test on anything, so I’ve got my calendar marked and we’ll see what happens around the first week in March. If we find ourselves neck deep in snow I’ll plan for further investigations, if not I’ll stack this nugget of knowledge next to my bag of gris-gris and keep my neck hairs pointed to the future.

Who am I to say what kind of truths can or can’t hide inside of probable bullshit?

you’re fearless instructor?

NLP hucksters have finally dragged their knuckles into the world of skateboarding creating one of the more enjoyable new paramounts of on-line douchebaggery I have come across in a while:

From: The Underground Skater
Friday, November 20, 2009

Dear Friend,

Are you absolutely frustrated by how difficult it is to learn new skateboard tricks?

I bet you are!

Whenever I’m at my local skate park, I always see skaters kicking and slamming their skateboard around when they have a hard time landing a new trick. You probably watched some “trick tip” videos, but they didn’t help. Your friends probably tried to teach you but you still couldn’t land them. Or maybe you did, but only once or twice.

If you did learn a couple of tricks, but how long did it take you? A month? Two months? A year? If it took your more than a week, then you are not learning as fast as you could!

The Cold Truth Behind Learning From Friends And Tutorial Videos

You see, most friends and tutorial videos are not very helpful in teaching tricks. Friends can only teach you how they do the trick. Every skater is different, so what works for others might not work for you.

Trick tip videos don’t help much either. If you search for “skateboard trick tips” in YouTube, you’ll be bombarded with instructional videos that give useless advice such as, “pop up the board, kick it out, catch it, and land.” Great advice.

Even professionally produced videos, such as Transworld’s “Show me the Way” or “Tony Hawk’s Trick Tips” miss many important points.

It angers me that people are wasting their time and money on these instructional videos in slight hope that they will improve. The cold truth is that… They Won’t.

But…

There is some good news…

If you can’t bare to be without the SECRET from this underground skater then you can follow this link here.

Shepard Fairey worked his mojo on a photo by Glen E. Friedman of elder skater Jim Muir who was hurt earlier this year in a surfing accident. There are a limited press of 450 of these signed by both Shepard and Jim Muir. The proceeds are going to help Muir pay ongoing medical bills.

Get yours here.

This just in from the Zythophile blog:

By itself this does not prove hops were used in beer, just “in drinks” (in potibus in Hildegard’s original Latin). But in a later chapter, on the ash tree, the abbess wrote: “If you also wish to make beer from oats without hops, but just with grusz [gruit], you should boil it after adding a very large number of ash leaves. That type of beer purges the stomach of the drinker, and renders his heart [literally ‘chest’ or ‘breast’] light and joyous.” Clearly Hildegard knew about brewing beer with hops. The passage also suggests that Hildegard knew about boiling wort, without which just adding hops is not much help in keeping away “putrefactions”.”

Read the whole piece here.

A buddy of mine just picked these up for his splitboard he plans to take out for the first time this year. I haven’t had a chance to see them yet, but they look pretty sweet.

This is a great survey done by Popular Mechanics on different beer brewing set-ups. #4 is pretty slick, me thinks.

Here’s a pretty interesting video from Chow.com where the cute and knowledgeable host talks with Russian River Brewing Company’s brewmaster Vinnie Cilurzo about the process of making this beer and the unusual yeast, Brettanomyces, that they use.

Remember being a kid and watching filmstrips about how robots were going to change our lives and free us from mundane tasks. Well, this isn’t exactly Johnny 5 but it is remote controlled and looks like a robot. What’s more you can build it yourself and best of all it makes drinks. The plans don’t seem terribly difficult or expensive and are fairly well laid out.
Here’s the official site, it’s got great pictures of all the materials used. It brings a tear to my bleary eye to see this perfect marriage of innovation genius and leisure. As the great Yakov Smirnoff would say, “America: What a country!”

Here’s a video of BAR2D2 in action

BAR2D2’s creator is continuing to tweak his invention. he recently added an automated drink maker so you can choose from a variety of drinks and have it made for you.

Here’s a good article on prepping your cornelius keg to serve your homebrew.

We’re brewing a Bell’s Two Hearted Clone this weekend for our second batch of beer. The thought on this was that with a clone we’ll have something to compare the final product to and, hopefully, have a better idea of what we are doing well and what we’re doing, well, not so well. Not to mention, if this thing is even vaguely successful it’ll be great to have a keg of our very own, homebrewed IPA clouding up my judgement.

Part of the clone recipe calls for dry hopping. I had a fairly good idea what this meant, figuring we should be throwing in some more of the Centennial hops after we pull the wort off the flame, but I wasn’t sure just exactly when after the flame goes out that we should be adding the hops. I was surprised to find out that to dry hop a beer you add your hops after the end of the initial fermentation, around 5-7 days after adding the yeast.

Here’s a nice overview of dry hopping the helped school me on this.