Dietary Supplements

For those who think that FDA regulation of dietary supplements would be a bad idea, and that the current system works:

FDA: Chinese Dietary Supplements Contain Viagra [FOXNews.com]

The agency advised consumers to stay away from Shangai Chaojimengnan supplements sold under the names Super Shangai, Strong Testis, Shangai Ultra, Shangai Ultra X, Lady Shangai and Shangai Regular. The Chinese-made supplements are packaged and distributed by Shangai Distributor Inc. of Puerto Rico.

Note the "advised consumers to stay away..." Even though it contains a prescription medication, because it's sold as a "dietary supplement" the most the FDA can do (unless people start dying) is to advise people to avoid the product. Something capable of producing serious drug interactions, and that itself contains a controlled substance, cannot be removed from the market. The FDA also had no authority to test this "supplement" before it was imported and sold.

The simple fact is that we don't know what's in these quasi-regulated pills and potions. There are labelling laws, but they rely on the manufacturer, testing by the FDA is minimal and infrequent, and it's difficult to get even a proven violator taken off the market. There's a reason we have a federal agency whose purpose is to guarantee the safety of our food and drug supply.

Painting

Previously...

Prepped:

Primed:

Progress:

Presto!

It's Not Stupid, It's Art!

I've decided that anyone who espouses a view that I consider patently absurd is, in fact, a performance artist. Ann Coulter? Performance artist. (This has been suggested before.) That woman who wants to ban cupcakes and force Santa to lose weight? Performance artist. Creationists? The largest performance art troupe in human history.

It's a lot less disconcerting, isn't it? It can even be impressive, like Stephen Colbert writ large (OK, larger).

Oh, and I totally call dibs on credit for coining the insult, "Stop being such a performance artist," or, "What are you? A performance artist?" I mean, I do have to think of my legacy.

Advice for People Who Are Painting a Room

If you're thinking of painting over the vents, please don't. It becomes a pain for whoever is going to paint the room the next time. It's not difficult to remove the vents before painting; it's certainly easier than removing them after they've been painted over. It's even easier to put masking tape around the edges, though you can't then be as cavalier with the roller. Actually, it's easier to remove the vents — two screws, pull, and you're done.

If you really want the vent covers to be the same color as the wall, remove them first, paint them separately, let them (and the walls) dry, and then replace them. It's more work, sure, but you won't then have painted the damned things to the wall. The better option is still not to paint them, so the next person doesn't have to buy replacements.

This has been your grumpy homeowner's rant for the day.

Culinary Meme

JACE tagged me to keep this going.

What were you cooking/baking ten years ago?

I've been cooking to some extent for a long time, though for awhile my cooking was confined to breakfast-type items, mostly eggs. I took "Creative Foods" and "Baking" in 12th grade, to round out my schedule, but that was 17 years ago. Ten years ago I was in the midst of grad school, and I tended to keep things fairly quick and simple. I'd make stir-frys (often vegetarian, because tofu is easier to work with than meat), curries (with whole spices, of course), and the occasional macaroni with cheese sauce (not from a mix!). I'd also made a decent vegetarian chili.

What were you cooking/baking one year ago?

My cooking habits have, if anything, gotten worse. I still make the occasional curry, and I've learned how to make soups. Crock-Pot roast, in the colder months. Too often I throw something packaged into the microwave. And I make beer, which is like making stock, baking, and preserving all rolled into one. I'm generally cooking for one, which makes me less ambitious and adventurous.

Five snacks you enjoy:

I'm not much of a snacker, but...

1. popcorn, especially while watching 24
2. nuts, which I've started keeping on the kitchen counter in a pop-top plastic container
3. chips, with or without dip, if I've been stressed and have made the mistake of having some in the house
4. tortillas with melted cheese
5. does coffee count?

Five recipes you know by heart:

I rarely use recipes, preferring to wing it and go by smell. So, given that caveat..

1. cheese sauce
2. the way I make Crock-Pot roast
3. the way I make curry
4. real Belgian waffles (Brussels variety)
5. nachos (which is why the Super Bowl was invented, right?)

Five culinary luxuries you would indulge in if you were a millionaire:

This is a tough one, because my tastes generally run to the simple.

1. a home renovation to double the size of my kitchen, including putting in a pantry
2. a ten gallon conical fermenter
3. a meat grinder for making sausage, and someone to clean it
4. a wood-burning oven
5. a greenhouse with hydroponics so that I could have fresh produce, especially tomatoes and herbs, year-round

Five foods you love to cook/bake:

1. beer
2. nachos
3. macaroni and cheese, usually with sausage on the side
4. just about anything in the Crock Pot, if I can motivate myself to cook after eating dinner
5. pasta with ragout

Five things you cannot/will not eat:

As Cervantes wrote, "hunger is the best sauce." That being said, there are some things that I find unappetizing:

1. shrimp with the face still attached
2. anything with a mucous-like texture
3. pineapple on pizza
4. mayo on pastrami or corned beef (a reuben gets a pass, since russian dressing ends up not being particularly mayonnaise-like)
5. offal

Five favorite culinary toys:

1. five gallon ball-lock keg
2. Crock Pot
3. probe thermometer (useful for roasts and beer!)
4. rice cooker/vegetable steamer
5. deep fryer (though I haven't made wings in years)

Five dishes on your "last meal" menu:

If it's my last meal, it's still a meal, right? It should be coherent. So, we'll lead with the star:

1. lasagna
2. garlic bread
3. broccoli or brussels sprouts — I'd have to see which I'm in the mood for that day
4. Snapping Ginger Ale
5. a powerful anesthetic

Five happy food memories:

1. pretty much every Thanksgiving, including the ones I hosted in Ithaca
2. pretty much every Channukah, with my Mom's latkes and brisket
3. making filo triangles at home for cooking class, and having them come out perfect
4. making huge batches of Belgian waffles, just for the heck of it
5. the pot-lucks (both of them) that we had in Ithaca

Passing the Buck

I don't have many friends who blog (it must be an age thing). So, Stavros, you up for it?

Butternut Squash Soup, the Easy Way

A friend of mine in Ithaca gave me this recipe. Hopefully, he doesn't mind me sharing it with you, the blog-reading public. Scale this up as needed. I make one of these per two people, and it's become a Thanksgiving staple.

12oz. (1 block) frozen cooked winter squash
1/2 c. heavy cream
1/2 c. chicken broth
3 T. butter
milk
pumpkin pie spice
salt
pepper

Put the squash, cream, broth, and butter in a saucepan, and heat slowly. Do not allow it to come to a boil, or the cream will curdle. As it cooks, the mixture will thicken. Add milk to get the desired texture, roughly that of cream. Season to taste, typically a small pinch of salt, a few grinds of pepper, and maybe 1/4 t. of the pie spice.

Beowulf

I saw Beowulf with friends last night. It blew like "the wind that bark like a bird with breast of foam."

From the brief clips show in the advertisements, it wasn't clear that the movie was entirely computer-generated. It wasn't good computer animation. It looked to me like the Sims had made a movie.

We spent most of the movie lauging at both the dialog and action. It was, frankly, suprising that Beowulf kept his clothes on while fighting the dragon; it seemed to go against his fighting style. I was also interested to learn that the state of the art of computer animation is apparently incapable of rendering the human wang. It was like watching The Cosby Show when Phylicia Rashad was pregnant, but her character wasn't, so the director kept placing objects conveniently in front of her belly. In a display that Beowulf is in fact capable of learning, in a later battle he wore underwear, though in that "battle" he evidently didn't keep them on.

One of the most impressive features of the movie is that in the opening scene, before you've even seen the monster, you're already rooting for Grendel. The Danes in Heorot are being obnoxious. Grendel clearly just wants the frat next door to keep the noise down at their kegger because, you know, he's got to go to work tomorrow. Those sheep aren't going to kill themselves, after all.

As far as I can tell, the only reasons for this movie to receive any positive reviews are if people are still suckers for 3D (I saw it in a normal 2D theater), and the fact that cyber-Angelina Jolie was cyber-naked.

This may have contained spoilers, but I feel absolutely no guilt for not warning you. The spoilers won't ruin the movie any more for you than the movie itself already does. Am I bitter? Perhaps, but the last three movies I've seen in the theater are Beowulf, X-Men 3, and The Hulk. You'd be bitter, too.

Halloween 2007

It's just past 10pm, and it looks like the tricksters-or-treatsters are done for the evening. This was my first Halloween in my house, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect, volume-wise. I bought five bags of candy, figuring I'd have more than enough, which is better than running out.

My usual thing is to get a variety, and let the kids pick. I'd been told by my neighbors not to expect a huge number of kids, so from the outset I let them take two pieces each. A couple of the younger kids only took one. What amazed me was that one of them, fairly late in the tricking-or-treating, actually commented that he only needed one.

I'm not sure if I should despair of this generation.

Metapost: Metainformation

Think of this as housekeeping, but without the pine-fresh scent.

If you're a loyal (or at least grudging) reader, ask yourself these two questions:

1. "Have I submitted anything to the request line?"
2. "Have I told at least one other person, who probably doesn't know Mike, about this blog?"

When a Fish is not a Grape

There is a common etymological misconception that the phrase "puppy dog eyes" traces its origins to 1957 at Wilmington, Delaware's Camp Wanahakalugee, a summer camp frequented primarily by the children of employees of the Dupont Corporation. The story was that a particularly bad growing season resulted in a crop of white grapes that were somewhat lacking in firmness. This unfortunate texture, when combined with the natural tendencies of the pre-teen mind, was supposed to have led campers to begin referring to these grapes, often included with the camp's lunch or as an appetizer before afteroon tea, as the aforementioned immature canine ocular organs.

The prevalence of this explanation is such that a recent random sampling of linguists found that an astonishing 97% of them believe this to be the correct origin of the expression. It is, nevertheless, incorrect, as the true origin comes not from the monied solsticial juvenile boarding institutions of the Eastern Seaboard, but rather from the arboreal recesses of Appalachia.

A young lad, along with his faithful hound, was fishing one day in an eastern-Tennessee creek. The dog, as well as the boy's fishing gear, were piled into the go-cart with which the boy had recently won the Sevier County Non-Motorized Downhill Race and First-Aid Training Course, his Radio Flyer wagon being in the shop at the time for a transmission rebuild. As luck would have it, the only fish biting that day were mud puppies, but their size was made up for by their number, and as evening approached the go-cart was nearly full.

The boy loaded the rest of his gear and the hound into the go-cart, and began pulling it towards home. While rounding a bend in the road, he glanced back and saw that his dog had been gorging on the mud puppies. Intending to scold the animal, the boy turned, at the same time letting go of the cart. Owing to the slight downward slope of the road, and the quality with which the go-cart was constructed, the cart immediately began to roll under gravity's influence, quickly reaching speeds well beyond the boy's capacity to keep pace.

Eventually, of course, the go-cart rolled to a stop, coincidentally not far from the center of town. The hound, both frightened from its ordeal and queasy from the mud puppies sitting uneasily in its stomach, began to exhibit signs of digestive discomfort. Much to the consternation of the gathered townsfolk, the hound began vomitting up the fish it had eaten.

Oddly, the most distinguishable feature of the mud puppies in mid-digestion were their eyes. The sight of the distressed hound and the fish eyes was by far the saddest thing any of the onlookers had ever seen, resulting in the expression "as sad as mud puppy eyes" gaining currency in the local vernacular. Over time, the most common usage was to refer to something pitiable by comparison with "mud puppy eyes". The expression spread to neighboring areas, and as it was employed increasingly be people having little or no familiarity with the origin, it was further shortened to "puppy eyes". The transformation to the phrase as currently known (with the earliest recorded instance being in a 1963 op-ed piece in the New York Times) derives from a misunderstanding of its origin.

The veracity of this origin for the phrase "puppy dog eyes" is established by the fortunate coincidence that a now-anonymous local was, at the time, recording local footage with his recently purchased Sears Roebuck home video camera. The audio, while somewhat faint, clearly establishes a prototypical form of the original expression. The video, for its part, while grainy, still conveys enough detail that you would likely not want to watch it on a big-screen TV.

The hound, for its part, was ultimately none the worse for wear for its ordeal. Local lore has it that it was extremely repentant of its actions, and subsequently refused to eat seafood.

In Honor of "Talk Like a Pirate Day" We Present "Write Like a Pirate Day"

liusadhyfv 3 37y vfro87 873 yvro87resygf 43 87o o87v343 87f3 vr o8v3q7oq o87fds liufhv lksdh 43q 3

[Note: Most pirates were illiterate. Me hearties.]

My Dinner with Danger

I was sitting at the bar at Johnny Spatula's, getting stewed on scotch with bourbon chasers. The door opened, basting the place in dusty daylight, which was odd, since I didn't expect anyone but me to be drinking at eight in the morning. I blanched as a meaty hand landed on my shoulder, spinning me around on my barstool like a rotisserie chicken. My worst fears gelatinized when I found myself staring at the ugly mug of Rocco Gelato.

"I shoulda known I'd find you here, Sam," he growled, "spending the money you owe me on the sauce." Rocco was a tough egg. He was real hard-boiled, over-boiled, and he looked almost boiled over. But I knew he was just steamed about the clams. I knew I'd have to feed him some half-baked excuse, I just had to hope he'd swallow it.

"Simmer down, Rocco. I'm working on a big case, a real tought nut, but it'll be a couple days before it's cracked." It was all a lie, of course; I didn't even have anything on the back burner, but it was enough to extract a grunt from Rocco, who left after one or two muddled threats.

I caught a cab that whisked me back to my office, where I could hone my anxiety over what that masher Rocco would do to me if I couldn't pay up. There was a wrap on the door, and in walked a leggy tomato in a lime-green blouse and a wine skirt that looked like it'd been reduced by half. She may have had bad taste, but at least she didn't have much of it. "My name is Bree Souffle, Mr. Trivet, and I'd like to employ your services."

"Have a seat, Ms. Souffle," I said, gesturing to an empty chair, "You look like you're about to collapse. Now, what's cooking?"

"It's my fiance, Ned Shanks. It turns out he was playing me for a fool all along, and the engagement was just a recipe for him to get his hands on my inheritance. I don't want the publicity I'd get by going to the police, so there's a thousand dollars in boullion for you if you can get my money back discreetly." A grand would square me with Rocco, with gravy in the mix, so I said I'd take the case.

If Shanks was on the lam with that kind of dough, I knew there was only one guy who could give me a lead. As I walked to where I figured I'd find him, my wool suit had me in a sweat in the 90 degree weather. I was braised like a ham hock, but at least I knew I'd be bringing home the bacon.

A couple of boring days of chasing down leads and getting my jaw broken, it looked like I was in the soup when I finally tracked Shanks down to the waterfront. "Give it up, Shanks," I said, "Return Bree's inheritance, and I'll let you cheese it."

"Why should I?" he replied, "You've got less on me than a kosher deli has ham."

"You forget, I've got this Magnum, and it's pointed right at that cabbage of yours," I reminded him.

"Baloney. You shoot that thing, and the cops will be crawling over this place like ants on a picnic basket." His tone was defiant, but I could see in his eye that he was waffling.

"Let them; Sam Trivet can handle the heat. Besides, I'll just tell them it was self-preserving."

"You're not getting the money, and this conversation is getting rather bland," he sneered, his self-assuredness steeling, so I peppered him with bullets. They say you've got to season to taste, and I've always been partial to hot lead. Now Bree's back rolling in dough, Rocco's got his bread, and there was enough left over for me to wet my whistle.

Clothing and Fascism — The Truth Can Finally be Told!

Much has been written of Mussolini's ruthless pursuit of efficiency as a means to a strong nationalist economy. For example, it is almost cliché to point to the fact that under his rule the trains always ran on time, to preserve the freshness of the marshmallow fluff that was the backbone of the pre-war Italian economy. (It is chilling for modern geo-politics to note that the role of crude oil in contemporary Venezuela is essentially identical to that of marshmallow fluff in 1930's Italy.)

Less has been written of Mussolini's ruthless pursuit of carousels. He was completely obsessed with them, and was known to travel for hours just to see a single carousel pony that had been painted in a particularly unique manner. It was one such carousel that dramatically changed the direction not only of Mussolini's avocation, but that of Italian Fascism and, indeed, world history.

The carousel in question was part of Federico Fellini's Carnival dell'Assurdità. Before his career as one of the great auteurs of cinema, Fellini was well known in the carnival community for his fascination with the bizarre. It was at this carousel that Mussolini spied a toddler riding in a giant fiberglass pair of pants. Immediately, a spark was ignited in Mussolini's mind; a spark that would become an obsession, a frustration, and ultimately a humiliation.

Mussolini's idea was to design a pair of Techno-Trousers that would give the wearer the ability to travel great distances at high speed without tiring (while developing exceptionally toned thighs). He immediately focused the bulk of Italian technological research towards the development of these Techno-Trousers, though he was unable to convince Adolf Hitler to assist in this, being met instead with ridicule from his ally (who chose to focus German war-time R&D on the Combat Skort).

Work on the Techno-Trousers greatly influenced Italian foreign, as well as domestic, policy. The 1936 invasion of Ethiopia, for instance, was planned predominantly to gain control of Ethiopia's vast cotton resources. Mussolini believed this was essential, so that the linings in the prototype trousers could be changed to cotton from wool, which caused considerable chafing of the wearer. Mussolini was also motivated by Ethiopia's coffee crop, as Italian scientists were working nearly around-the-clock on the Techno-Trousers project, and required vast quantities of caffè perfecto to remain awake.

Ultimately, the Techno-Trousers never got past the prototype stage. The only known deployment of a Techno-Trouser was a prototype worn by Il Duce himself to help keep him upright during his legendary marathon speeches. This was noted briefly by several Italian fashion reporters as "Mussolini's big pants," which was followed quickly by the reporters being shot and the articles being purged from the record. Other fashion reporters, who entered journalism for the hem lines, not the firing lines, quickly took the cue and omitted any subsequent mention of Mussolini's clothing. There were, however, one or two veiled references made to his "strong fashion sense."

By the time of Mussolini's capture and execution, the existence of the Techno-Trousers project was known to the leaders of the anti-Fascist opposition. As an act of symbolic defiance of the Fascist war machine, Mussolini was hanged pantsless at his execution. It is a testament to the continued power of Mussolini's spirit, even in death, that photos taken of his lifeless body were framed so as not to reveal this final indignity.

Today, Mobile Armored Lower-Limb Outer-Wear (as they are known officially) are banned by the Geneva Convention. Rumors that they have been used recently on suspected terrorists, forced to participate in involuntary and hours-long games of "Dance Dance Revolution," are most likely fabrications.

A Few Useful Scripts

I have a set of perl scripts that I use fairly often. They convert numbers between decimal and hexadecimal, as well as to and from dotted-decimal. All are released under the GNU General Public License.

The calling syntax is the same for all of them:

$ dectohex 12345

or

$ echo 12345 | dectohex -

This allows them to be chained together.

[dectohex]

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Copyright (c) 2007  Michael A. Marsh
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any
# later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
# General Public License for more details.
#
# The GNU General Public License is available at
# http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt or by writing to the
# Free Software Foundation, Inc.
# 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor
# Boston, MA  02110-1301 USA
#

$usage = "Usage: dectohex  | -\n";

$arg = shift @ARGV || die $usage;

sub do_translate
{
   my ( $dec ) = @_;

   $hex = sprintf "%X", $dec;

   print "$hex\n";
}

if ( $arg eq '-' )
{
   while(<>)
   {
      do_translate($_);
   }
}
else
{
   do_translate($arg);
}

[hextodec]

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Copyright (c) 2007  Michael A. Marsh
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any
# later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
# General Public License for more details.
#
# The GNU General Public License is available at
# http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt or by writing to the
# Free Software Foundation, Inc.
# 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor
# Boston, MA  02110-1301 USA
#

$usage = "Usage: hextodec  | -\n";

$arg = shift @ARGV || die $usage;

sub do_translate
{
   my ( $hextotal ) = @_;

   $dec = hex($hextotal);

   print "$dec\n";
}

if ( $arg eq '-' )
{
   while(<>)
   {
      do_translate($_);
   }
}
else
{
   do_translate($arg);
}

[dectoip]

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Copyright (c) 2007  Michael A. Marsh
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any
# later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
# General Public License for more details.
#
# The GNU General Public License is available at
# http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt or by writing to the
# Free Software Foundation, Inc.
# 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor
# Boston, MA  02110-1301 USA
#

$usage = "Usage: dectoip  | -\n";

die $usage unless scalar(@ARGV);
$arg = shift @ARGV;

sub do_translate
{
   my ( $dec ) = @_;

   die $usage unless $dec =~ /^\d+$/;

   $hextotal = sprintf "%x",$dec;

   @digits = split(//,$hextotal);

   while(@digits)
   {
      $digit = pop(@digits);
      $digit = pop(@digits) . $digit if(@digits);
      unshift(@pieces,hex($digit));
   }
   while ( scalar(@pieces) < 4 )
   {
      unshift(@pieces,0);
   }

   $ipaddr = join('.',@pieces);

   print "$ipaddr\n";
}

if ( $arg eq "-" )
{
   while(<>)
   {
      do_translate($_);
   }
}
else
{
   do_translate($arg);
}

[iptodec]

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Copyright (c) 2007  Michael A. Marsh
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any
# later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
# General Public License for more details.
#
# The GNU General Public License is available at
# http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt or by writing to the
# Free Software Foundation, Inc.
# 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor
# Boston, MA  02110-1301 USA
#

$usage = "Usage: iptodec  | -\n";

$arg = shift @ARGV || die $usage;

sub do_translate
{
   my ( $ipaddr ) = @_;

   @pieces = split(/\./,$ipaddr);

   die $usage unless ( @pieces == 4 );

   for($i=0;$i<@pieces;++$i)
   {
      die "IP address must be in dotted-decimal form\n"
         unless $pieces[$i]=~/^\d+$/;
      $hexvals[$i] = sprintf "%02x",$pieces[$i];
   }

   #$hextotal = @hexvals[0..4];

   $hextotal = join '',@hexvals;

   $dec = hex($hextotal);

   print "$dec\n";
}

if ( $arg eq "-" )
{
   while(<>)
   {
      do_translate($_);
   }
}
else
{
   do_translate($arg);
}

rms reminisce

In keeping with my policy of violating my policy on not posting personal stuff, I had dinner this evening with Richard Stallman. It wasn't, of course, a one-on-one dinner. He was speaking at the university, and I was one of the group that went with him to dinner.

I have to say, I've read and heard a lot about his personality, and dinner was very pleasant and non-contentious. I was prepared for impassioned arguments throughout the meal. Granted, he spent much of the time catching up on work, but he'd certainly chime in with "GNU plus Linux" whenever someone slipped up and referred to "Linux." We were also watching ourselves to not accidentally say "open source" but rather "free software." I understand and sympathize with both points — he's right on both counts, if you want to be pedantic. As an activist who's always "on," it's his job to be pedantic, which can't be easy.

There wasn't much getting to know the guy, but I suspect he appreciated the opportunity to get some work done as the rest of us chatted, and he contributed significantly more to the conversation than just correcting our terminology. He seemed to enjoy his sushi, as well, certainly enough to get a couple of extra pieces.

What's the point of this post? None, really, other than to say, "Hey, I met Richard Stallman," and that, as someone who isn't a confidant, I found him reasonably pleasant to be around. Given many of the accounts I've read online, that seems to bear mention. You know, balance and all that.

Impressions of an Idiot

Today, I mowed my lawn. From my last post, you know this means I pushed a reel mower around my yard. I also had to pick up a bunch of twigs, which took some time.

All told, I spent about an hour clearing my yard and mowing. I could tell I was getting a workout, and by the end I was ready to take off my jacket, even though it's in the 30s here.

My impression? It wasn't too bad. Given the first mow of the season is supposed to be the most difficult, since you're mowing older growth, I don't expect it to be a difficult lawn to mow. Negotiating the roots in the back was perhaps the most difficult part, but as I was mowing there I noticed that the grass wasn't particularly full, so some sort of ground cover would probably grow better there anyway.

The biggest surprise was that the slopes in my yard were much easier to mow than I'd expected. It helps that they're both short and narrow. Overall, I think my yard looks nice after the push mow, and I'll be guaranteed at least half an hour of cardio exercise every week during the growing season.

Idiot Not Included

In another of an infrequent series of posts relating to me personally, as a new homeowner I suddenly have to worry about things of which I was blissfully oblivious in the past. Water in my basement was one such thing. Another is suddenly finding myself with a lawn that has decided, against all reason, to grow.

As a consequence of this lawn growth, I've bought a lawn mower. It has what my Dad refers to as a 1IP engine. That's one idiot-power. Yes, it's a push reel mower. This wasn't an effort to be cheap. Nor was it particularly an effort to be "green." Gas mowers are a pain, and electric mowers seem to suck. Electric mowers either have power cords, which, face it, sucks, or they have heavy batteries that make them a pain to push and that take a day to recharge (also sucks). I've used a good electric mower, but that model hasn't been made in years.

So, I researched my mower options, and a push reel mower seemed to make sense. For one, I have a very small yard. The front is mostly level, with slopes along the sides towards the back. The back is again mostly level, though with a fair number of tree roots. It's also only about half grass, with extensive slate work and some planter boxes. If the roots give me trouble, the back might become even less grass-covered.

If you're curious, I bought a Brill Luxus 38. I've only just assembled it and taken it for a test swath. I have to say, it's pretty nice. At $210, with free shipping, it's on the pricey end of push mowers, but it allegedly won't need sharpening for a decade. I've got it set at 4cm (it's made in Germany), which was a reasonably easy cut through some appreciable grass. So, while it's still a bit early to tell, I think I'm going to be happy with it. The weirdest thing about was that the assembly instructions were effectively in reverse. I suspect it would have been a lot easier to assemble the handle completely (one Phillips-head screwdriver required) before attaching anything to the reel. When mowing, it makes a pleasant shwuff shwuff shwuff sound — much nicer than the buzz of a gas or electric mower.

Mmm...beer

I'm pleased to announce yet another blog. OK, this one doesn't get a lot of attention, and "Lying Scum-Weasels" was more-or-less a colossal failure. This new blog will be different, though. This new blog is: 36 Pints. It's about homebrewing, in particular about the homebrewing that my friends and I are doing. I'll be following each batch from inception to consumption. See the welcome post for more details.

Will Shill for Swag

As a renowned blogger, my opinion carries a lot of weight. If you're a manufacturer or distributer of fine products, for example a Sumo Omni, why not send me goodies to receive a (most likely favorable) review on this very blog?

NOTE: No guarantee is made regarding my own renown nor the effectiveness of my personal endorsement. All shilling is at the risk of the shilled.

The Great Beerjunction

Later this week, I'm bottling the second batch of beer (a Märzen) with one friend at his house. This weekend, I'm starting the second batch (probably an IPA) with another friend at his house. Sometime soon, possibly next weekend, I'll be kegging the first batch (a honey lager) at my new house.