perfidy

American Wheat Ale

5 lbs wheat dry malt extract (50% wheat, 50% barley)
2 oz Hallertau Mittelfreuh hops, in 1/2 oz plugs
White Labs WLP 001, California Ale Yeast

Brought 3/5 gallons of spring water to boil in kettle. Added extract and 1 oz hops at boil.
Added 1/2 oz flavor hops at 30 minutes
Added another 1/2 oz hops at 15 minutes

Pitched yeast at 68 degrees - fermented itself up to 72 and was done in about 3 days. Racked to secondary and let settle for 3 weeks before kegging.

This beer is fantastic. Smooth, creamy, with that clear hop flavor and faint tartness that California yeast brings. Oddly for a wheat, it's crystal clear and golden, not as pale or hazy as I might have expected. Well, I might have added some Irish moss to clarify; I just don't damn well remember. Nice sweetness, beautifully balanced bitterness with a great touch of noble hop flavor and a little aroma. I swear I'm getting some creamsicle notes off this, and it's really wonderful. I'll be making this one again, no doubt.

I don't know who the hell Ronald Jenkees is, or where he came from, but this freaky mothereffer has his shit together. Such a geek! Such incredible beats!!! How soon till H.O.V.A. calls Ronald up for his next inevitable comeback? How many of our readers thought that last sentence was total gibberish?

Support your local independent musicians, y'all!

(found via boingboing)

Too Bitter Porter

So, what I was after, was a nice dry porter with a good dose of spicy herbal hops in the flavor and nose. What I got was horribly overbittered and a good beer ruined. I ended up tossing the last half of this batch from the keg to make room for the next brew I did. So, that's pretty much a disaster.

5 lbs light dry malt extract
3/4 lbs crystal malt, 60L
1/4 lb chocolate malt
1/4 lb black patent malt
.8 oz Galena hop pellets, bittering (12% AAU)
1 oz UK Fuggles hop pellets, aroma and flavor
1 oz Tettnanger Tettnang hop pellets, aroma and flavor
2 packages SAFale 33 dry ale yeast

Steeped grains in 1 gallon of spring water and brought 3 to boil. Sparged grains in hot kettle water and added steeping water. Galena and DME added at boil
Hop addition:
Galena 60 min
1/2 oz each Tett and Fuggles 20 min
1/2 oz each Tett and Fuggles, 5 min

Pitched yeast at 72 degrees. Fermentation began slowly but wrapped up in three days. Racked to secondary and let rest for three weeks before kegging. Force-carbonated with CO2.

Almost, but not quite, a good beer. Actually, quite good with heavy food, but just too much bittering hop. A damn shame.

It's so sad.

The New York Times Magazine has a deeply depressing ten-page spread this week about the New Savior of the Music Bidness, the One Hero Who Can Save Us All From Certain Penury and Unemployment From Our Phoney Baloney Jobs... Mister Rick Rubin!!

Yep, Rick Rubin. Helluva record producer. Helluvan ear on that guy. LL, Run DMC, Slayer, Anthrax, the Chili Peppers, Johnny Cash's comeback, Neil Friggin' Diamond's very good comeback... that guy knows music for sure. But to save the music industry? Rick Rubin?

Please.

The thrust of the article is that Sony has made Rick Rubin the co-Head of Columbia Records, in the hopes of injecting a little of that wyld-ass energy he's got into the proceedings, and in the process transmogrifying the ailing Industry into something leaner, meaner, and more efficent at siphoning money into the pockets of shareholders.

Now, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with that, really. The job of a corporation is, indeed, to "maximize shareholder value." So good luck with that. But check out some of the "hot" "new" "ideas" that Rubin and his co-Head, a middle-aged run of the mill British record exec named Steve Barnett

(I once worked for a sharp and dapper gentleman, a young pretty thing and a rising force in the Industry, who had a taste for shiny suits, expensive haircuts, and the saddest upscale parties I've ever been near, lame affairs where the lower echelons sucked down furious premium cocktails on the company dime while a D-list hipster celebrity like Tricky or the guy who played drums on that Bjork record lurked sulkily in a padded banquette until enough minutes had crawled past that he could reasonably said to have performed the favor of appearing. This particular person had a penchant for arranging the firings of underlings who, in his estimation, were not partying hard enough at company outings. This man had executive power and the trust of a wealthy aging blowhard who once was a person of some consequence in music, at least until he was let go.

...but at least let go more gracefully than the one who was sacked after refusing to leave his hot tub to take an urgent call from the CFO, with an unfortunate sequence of words by way of instruction to his minion, such words being unfortunate due to their inference as to the character and moral standing of the CFO, and their audibility in the conference room at the other end of the line, the minion having failed to put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone...

... the wealthy aging blowhard mentioned two paragraphs prior recently being heard to remark an interview, "I love iPod. I think iPod is great...")

...a run of the mill British record executive named Steve Barnett have cooked up to save Columbia, save Sony, and save the World.

This summer, Columbia Records began a program called Big Red. The company invited 20 college students from Harvard, Penn State and the University of Miami to work on various music projects. The interns concentrated mostly on the digital marketing and promotions departments in Columbia's offices in Midtown Manhattan, which are on Madison Avenue in a granite skyscraper designed by Philip Johnson.

At the end of their paid internships, the students took part in focus groups that were closely observed by Steve Barnett, Rubin's co-head at the label, and Mark DiDia, whom Rubin brought in as head of operations, as well as by other Columbia executives. The focus groups may have been the real point of Big Red — Barnett and the New York executives, especially those who had been at Sony for years, wanted to try to take the pulse of the elusive music audience. "The Big Red focus groups were both depressing and informative, and they confirmed what I — and Rick — already knew," DiDia told me afterward. "The kids all said that a) no one listens to the radio anymore, b) they mostly steal music, but they don't consider it stealing, and c) they get most of their music from iTunes on their iPod. They told us that MySpace is over, it's just not cool anymore; Facebook is still cool, but that might not last much longer; and the biggest thing in their life is word of mouth. That's how they hear about music, bands, everything."

Well, duh. But wait! There's an idea here!

At Rubin's suggestion, [Barnett] has also set up a "word of mouth" department, which will probably employ some members of the Big Red focus group along with dozens of other 20-somethings. The "word of mouth" department will function as a publicity-promotional arm of the company, spreading commissioned buzz through chat rooms across the planet and through old-fashioned human interaction. "They tell all their friends about a band," Barnett explained. "Their job is to create interest."

Wow. Damn. The secret to rescuing one of the greatest labels in the history of the world, and the flagship of one the big five... four... three sir! record companies is, pay some teenagers to go on the internet and pretend to give a shit about bands to their friends.

Shit! If only someone'd tried that eight years ago, set up a guy as, I dunno, the "internet marketing manager" and given him money and access to interns eager to tell their buddies all about the next big never-gonna-be, an', an', indie companies that you could pay to get content on dorm-room televisions, an', an' on campuses and into high schools and skate parks! If only every label in the world had tried that exact strategem back at the advent of the decade, the ship mighta been wrenched around by that critical arc minute to swing it juuuuust wide of the iceberg!

Oh, wait. They all screaming goddamn well did.

Brilliant, gentlemen.

But what else have they in mind?

Rubin has a bigger idea [I bet he does (-Johno)]. To combat the devastating impact of file sharing, he, like others in the music business (Doug Morris and Jimmy Iovine at Universal, for instance), says that the future of the industry is a subscription model, much like paid cable on a television set. "You would subscribe to music," Rubin explained, as he settled on the velvet couch in his library. "You'd pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you'd like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television. Anywhere. The iPod will be obsolete, but there would be a Walkman-like device you could plug into speakers at home. You'll say, 'Today I want to listen to ... Simon and Garfunkel,' and there they are. The service can have demos, bootlegs, concerts, whatever context the artist wants to put out. And once that model is put into place, the industry will grow 10 times the size it is now."

So, say I'm somewhere like, I dunno, my buddys fire pit in Northeastern Ohio. We got a bale of primo bud and a cooler full ale. And we wanna rock the fark out to Motorhead. All we gotta do is... wait... dude, do you get broadband out here?

But at least Barnett sees reason here:

Steve Barnett is nervous about the subscription model. "Smart people have told me if the subscription model is not done correctly," he said, "it will be the final nail in our coffin. I've heard both sides of the argument, and I'm not convinced it's the solution to our problems. Rick wants to be a hero immediately. In his mind, you flick a switch and it's done. It doesn't work like that."

So, what you're sayin' is, your highly paid guru who has no office, no shoes, no phone number you can reach him on, and an oracular perspective on the Future of the Industry, is halfway fulla shit. Noted.

But this is where the antics spill over into full-on Larry/Curly/Moe madness. Check this shit out!

Barnett has other ideas, which he is discussing with Rubin. For instance, asking Columbia artists to give the record company up to 50 percent of their touring, merchandising and online revenue. This is unprecedented — even successful artists like the Dixie Chicks make a large percentage of their income from concerts and T-shirts.

So let's break this down good so even the dim kids in the back of the class get it. Artists signed to major labels get this much money from album sales:

• Zero.

If they go reaaaaaaly far, shift a few million units, that number can rocket all the way up to

• A little.

Artists, every artist, from the overly earnest hairy-legged songbird down at your local coffe joint, to Buckethead's wife's excellent band, to Cheap Trick, to the Rolling Stones, Prince, and Barbra herself, make money in these ways:

• Touring and appearances
• Merch (t-shirts, keychains, beer coozies, etc.)
• Whatever b.s. online revenue streams they can dig up.

If the artist also happens to be a songwriter, or to control their own publishing, they may also get decent to spectacular paydays off of that as well, and forego some of the above. (The rap and electronic worlds also have their alternate revenue streams, but at the end of the day they amount to a new flavor of touring, merch, online B.S., publishing, or songwriting.)

So, basically, leaving aside songwriting and publishing which are separate pillars of the business, with their own contracts, deal structures, and support agencies, the magic bullet that's gonna save Sony/Columbia from disappearing up their own anii while simultaneously collapsing in a fiery heap while offstage a muted trumpet plays "waaah-waaah" is, WE'LL FIND OUT WHAT MONEY OUR ARTISTS ARE EARNING, AND MAKE THEM GIVE IT TO US INSTEAD!!!

(While, one presumes, twisting their moustaches in glee and twisting their monocles deeper into their eye sockets, the better to see the young immigrant boys they hired straight off a plane at JFK for a nickel wrestle each other to their deaths. Sweet suffering Jesus; there's villainy, and then there's incompetent cartoon villainy.)

So, while the money man is looking at grade-skool level larceny as a viable corporate survival strategy, what's the GURU up to, Stu?

[Rubin is] always on a quest to find just the right thing, whether it be a book or a building. Recently, he hunted down the brand of water that claims to have the greatest level of purity (Ice Age); he pored over architectural manuals to determine what kind of hinge would have been used in 1923 (for his house); and when Johnny Cash was ailing, Rubin discovered a kinesiologist whom Cash credited with extending his life. And so on. Rubin has always been passionate, even compulsive, about his interests.

Gentlemen, I say with mingled regret and pleasure that you all deserve everything you get.

[wik] Oh, and another thing about that "Big Red" focus group? Isn't it a truism that kids these days (kids these days!!) have finely tuned bullshit detectors that can see right through most forms of marketing known to man and many which haven't even been invented yet? And a bunch of teenagers on the intarnets getting paid in free.... what.... free CDs??? Free "subscriptions" to whatever music download service Sony pukes up?... are going to somehow outwit their peers?

I've seen it a hundred times. Pimping music is wonderful and even fulfilling when you can really believe in the quality of the record you're working. Then it's no so much like whoring, and more like evangelizing. But nine times out of ten, you're actually getting paid to pretend that some giant steaming turd is really a tasty sandwich, when everyone from Prague to Paducah can see the difference. And that not only sucks the soul right out of you, it's how record companies and their hacks become hacks. The stink of hack clings to the hacky hacks like cigar smoke and drug store perfume clings to the upholstery in the $20 lapdance room out at the Moonlight on old Route 11. And you don't really come back from that.

As we await... and wait... and wait... the arrival of our characteristically stubborn firstborn, who is holding onto his cushy life in the womb like the last Japanese regular fiercely defending his little patch of Iwo Jima in late 1948, refusing to accept that history has moved on, I finally convinced my patient and loving wife to show me how to make the ethnic food of her Pennsylvania hill-country home.

Possum.

Naw, I'm just shining you on. Up in the hills of Western Pennsylvania, in the countless factory towns that line the Allegheny and the Kiskemin...Kiske... the Kiskesomethiwhatsit River, everyone eats pierogi. Originally brought to the area by the Slavic, Polish and Ukrainian immigrants of the early part of the last century, they have since transcended ethnicity to become the soul food of the region. Well, them and the cabbage-and-noodle dish known as haluski, but that's a recipe for another day.

Sadly, with the passing of all the grandmothers born before the war, good pierogi is increasingly hard to find. These days, their daughters and granddaughters have jobs, and the old parish kitchens where women would gather every Friday to gossip and make pierogi have all but vanished. It's a dying art in a dying region.

And so, a nice project for a rainy afternoon: Pierogi. (Makes about 6 dozen dumplings)

• 34 ounces (8 cups) all purpose flour
• .68 oz (2 1/2 teaspoons) salt
• 4 eggs, lightly beaten
• 10 oz (1 1/4 cups) water, at room temperature
• 1/2 cup butter, softened

BY HAND:

Place flour in a large bowl and whisk in the salt. Add eggs and water and butter and mix until rough. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and knead just until all ingredients are combined and homogeneous, and the dough is smooth and silky - about 3-5 minutes. Do not over-miz as this dough needs to be plastic (extensible), not elastic (will snap back).

BY MIXER: Alternatively, combine all ingredients in bowl of stand mixer. Mix with paddle attachment until roughly mixed, and then switch to the dough hook and mix on low speed for no more than 2-3 minutes or until dough is homogeneous, smooth, and silky. Do not over-mix as this dough needs to be plastic (extensible), not elastic (will snap back).

BOTH METHODS: Make and cool your fillings as the dough rests, or have them prepared and ready.

• Minced mushrooms sauteed in oil with a little onion, garlic and salt
• Plain sauerkraut (I use my parent's homemade)
• Sauerkraut combined with the above mushrooms (YUM!)
• Mashed potato with sauteed minced onion and garlic, seasoned with salt and pepper and a tiny dash of nutmeg
• The above potatoes plus gouda, smoked gouda, or cheddar
• Ricotta or cottage cheese, with a little salt and pepper, plus optionally some paprika
• Leeks sauteed in butter with a little garlic (to make the ravioli that the Afghanis know as "aushak")
• Winter squash baked with sugar and cinnamon
• Winter squash baked and combined with a little garlic and sauteed leeks
• Pureed peas with mint, salt and pepper
• Blueberry or blackberry preserves, with ricotta or cottage cheese

Roll out the dough in batches, taking about a baseball sized lump at a time. Roll each iteration on a lightly floured surface until it is approximately 1/8 inch thick. Using a large biscuit cutter or the end of a large (20 oz) tomato can (or a 14 oz can if you desire, though this smaller size is more difficult to work with), cut out rounds from the dough. You may re-roll any scraps once only, before they get too dry and too tough to use.

(Although it is surely heresy to say so, I strongly recommend you buy some frozen commercial pierogi (for example Mrs T's) if you need to be reminded of the proper shape, size, and thickness. Homemade tend to turn out a bit thicker, which is not a bad thing at all, but you want to avoid making your dumplings too doughy.)

Depending on the size of cutter you use, place between 2 teaspoons and 1 heaping tablespoon of filling at the center of a round of dough - enough for a nice bite of filling. Fold the round over and crimp edge to create a sealed half-moon. You may use a moistened finger on the inside edge of the pierogi if you've having trouble getting them to seal. Optionally, you may crimp each sealed edge with a fork to make them look pretty. There should be about 1/3 inch to 1/2 inch of crimped edge when you're done, to ensure a good seal.

Place individually on lightly floured wax paper on baking sheets, making sure the pierogis do not touch. As you fill each pan, lightly flour the tops of the pierogis and cover the sheet pan with plastic wrap.

Cook fresh in boiling water until the pierogis float.

Alternatively, place each pan of pierogis in the freezer for at least 45 minutes before removing in layers separated by wax paper to labelled freezer bags or containers. I like to freeze in batches of a dozen.

Cook frozen pierogis in boiling water for about 5 minutes or until they float.

Serve tossed with onions sautéed in butter until soft, salt and pepper. Sour cream and applesauce are essential accoutrements to most traditional variations. The squash and pea versions proposed above would be nice with a lamb or pork roast. The cheese and berry versions are unsurpassed drunk food, especially if you happen to have a deep fryer in your home.

Apparently Google works, because some enterprising soul found a two-year old post of mine about infusing vodkas and had some questions about the construction of cayenne vodka. Well, Drunkle John is here to help!!

Amelia S. writes:

> Hello,
>
> I read your blog post from a loooong time ago about making infused vodkas. Apparently, you have cornered the online market for cayenne pepper vodka recipes. I grew some cayennes this year and want to make vodka, so I have a couple of questions for you:
>
> 1) If I only used a single cayenne, do you think that would tone down the heat?
> 2) Just out of curiosity, what do you think would happen if I left the pepper in the bottle permanently? I ask because I think it would be pretty. But, perhaps, deadly.
> 3) How did your ginger, orange, cranberry, and poblano vodkas turn out??
>
> Loved your post. Will probably link to it in my blog soon enough. :)
>
> - Amelia

Hi Amelia -

If you were to do just one pepper and leave it in the bottle permanently, I doubt anything bad would happen, and it would be pretty. But for cayenne vodka, I would recommend putting more than one pepper in, because cayenne flavor is a little one-dimensional and my suspicion is that one pepper only would give you heat but little pepper aroma or taste.

To tone down the heat and let some of the pepper character come through, you would probably want to remove the seeds and the inner membranes from the peppers before infusing - that means the seeds, the white pith, AND the very thin layer of whitish-pink veined flesh on the inside of the pepper. The skin and the deep red flesh are where the flavor and aroma are, but there's still some heat there. If you find that the resulting infusion lacks the desired punch after a week or two, put in another whole pepper with seeds included, and sample daily until the desired pain level is reached.

But know this - capsaicin is much heavier than ethyl alcohol or water and tends to sink to the bottom of the bottle. No matter which way you go, shake the bottle before each serving or that last couple ounces is going to be undrinkable.

As for my crazy experiments, the poblano wasn't too great - poblanos have a grassy character that dominated, without giving too much heat. Next time I will probably use seeded and de-veined habaneros. The ginger was merely OK - it takes a surprising amount of ginger to impart a distinctive ginger character to vodka. The cranberry was pretty good - a beautify ruby hue (the fruit came out of the infusion pallid and flabby - it really gave up a lot of character) with a nice tartness. The orange was extremely successful, a beautiful color with a lot of orange character.

If you're going to infuse vodkas, I'd recommend not doing what we did, which is to buy the cheapest stuff we could get and then try to filter out the heavier molecules that impart harshness. Despite good initial indications, it only works so well and the cheap vodka doesn't mix as well as even midrange hooch. Instead, get a decent bottle of grain vodka - a midrange one like Gordon's - and use that. The base hooch really ought to be drinkable on its own.

I haven't tried infusing in a while, and you remind me that I've been meaning to try a spiced vodka with cinnamon, green cardamom, clove, allspice and maybe just a tiny bit of cumin. Now I have a project! Thanks!

Hope this helps, and good luck!

Drunkle Johno

So there's this website I am doing some work for, that's run by the Herb Alpert Foundation. Yes, that Herb Alpert as if there were any other.

In any event, while cruising through the site's content library I recently came across proof positive that being old kicks ass. Some of you may have heard of Teo Macero, the legendary jazz producer who basically helped Miles Davis invent like four kinds of jazz, plus fusion, funk and electronic besides. Well, he's old now and kind of cantankerous. But he's got awesome stories.

Watch this great clip of Teo talking about working with Miles Davis, and wait for the part where he says "so I said book it, you white motherfucker!"

I'm g-dd-mn dying here, with the laughing. You can't make Blazing Saddles today, and you can't tell that kind of story if you're under sixty-five. Absolutely priceless.

A: Because the muslims just won't stop coming!!!

So, check out this utterly entertaining tale from Britain's Independent of one journalist's voyage on the National Review's recent reader cruise. Every sentence contains a new nugget of outrageousness that should have sprung from the pen of a young Tom Wolfe, or T. Coraghessen Boyle, or any other fiction writer whose stock in trade is wacky cruelty, not from a publication that despite its biases still must cling to some version of reality-as-lived.

The set-pieces are iconic: William Buckley, the founder of the magazine and grey eminence of American Conservatism, sulking shunned and mocked in his cabin as his movementarians flock around the spittle-flecked beard of Norman Podhoretz. The leggy blonde suntanner advocating gassing a few liberals to show them the consequences of treason, in the same distracted way as one might wonder if they could go for a nice mojito right about now. Mark Steyn at a table of admirers, holding forth on the brown tide threatening to subsume the white purity of Albion, and the rest of Europe too.

Go read this, and get a glimpse of a world in which George Bush is a steel-spined visionary hero, ululating hordes of sandaled beasts spit Betel nuts (or date pits... it's so hard to know what these brown people chew... do they chew Betel nuts or is that hashish?) at the very feet of l'Arc de Triomphe, and American liberals wake every morning with their hearts rising toward Mecca, fresh for another day of materially supporting America's sworn enemies.

Presented without comment, really good (or really bad) advice to America's youth.

[wik] Video, and the domain it was hosted on, are long dead. C'est la Vie.

One gauge of a person's moral fiber is how they treat animals.

Mitt Romney, for example, supports "extreme measures" for interrogators, and apparently thinks it's fine to strap the family dog to the roof of the car and drive from Massachusetts to Ohio. The shit rolling down the back windshield? That's doggy laughter.

Just sayin'.

My boy will say to me, one day in the not to distant future, "Daddy, what is your opinion of George Walker Bush's presidency and the legacy he left for the nation and the Republican party?" And I'll pick him up, dandle him on my knee (for he'll be preternaturally articulate and world-aware, like some real life version of Dawson's Creek), and say to him, "Son, it's like Tim Dickinson wrote in Rolling Stone: He was 'not much of a Republican at all – more like a retarded Christian AA version of Woodrow Wilson. He spent like crazy and he got America involved in these crazy 'let’s export the wonderfulness of us' adventures."

And then we'll both toast the good old days when the worst you could say about our President was that from time to time he mistook vaginas for humidors and had a tenuous relationship with the word "is."

Joe Boyd: The main inspiration was losing my job running Hannibal Records. I mean, I always thought I might write a book one day. I've always enjoyed writing and when I found myself out of a job, I thought, this is the time. Hannibal had become part of Rykodisc in 1991, and Rykodisc in 98 became part of Palm Pictures, the Chris Blackwell company. And that never really worked very well. There was a lot of downsizing, and all the people who got downsized were my people and the people who didn't really understand or sympathize with the music I was doing were the people who were kept. It got pretty impossible to look an artist in the eye and say, "I'm going to do a good job for you." I made demands to change it, and they said, "No. You're obviously not very happy, so why don't you go away?" That was 2001.

Yep, that's pretty much how that went down. I was there. And now I don't have to write that chapter of my autobiography.

The whole interview, by the way, with former Hannibal Records label honcho Joe Boyd, is pretty great. He's been around everywhere, knew everybody, did everything and then some and more than that too, and has a million great stories to tell.

So check this out: a young Chinese government censor let a memorial to the victims of theTiananmen Square massacre slip past her into the paper she censors, because having grown up with censored news, she'd never heard of it.

Haw!

On the subject of the 2012 olympic logo and its relative quality, I am told by the whole internets that the prevailing opinion is "it looks like Lisa Simpson giving a blowjob."

Why yes... yes it does.

London must stand firm. They MUST NOT bow to pressure to abandon this hilarious and utterly appropriate logo! If this logo goes, the terrorists win.
 

If you're not reading The Pour, food and wine writer Eric Asmiov's blog on wine, spirits, and food for the New York Times, you're missing one of the country's leading thinkers about the good things in life, mulling over the finer points of his chosen craft from the bottom of a glass. Great, great stuff.

And, hey. If you're not "into" wine," or think beer is always at its best icy cold and mostly tasteless, then... shit. Read a little Asimov and learn something you didn't know. No pressure. But like that great drunkard So-crates said, the unexamined glass is not worth drinking.

Holy shit, the Cleveland Frigging Cavaliers are in the NBA Finals for the first time ever.

Holy frigging shit.

With my first kid's arrival growing ever more imminent, I have like any responsible father been looking forward to the day when my young son (for a son it is) gets his first chemistry set. More even then that, I have been looking forward to the day when the boy successfully blows something up using ingredients found in said chemistry set.

But apparently, that makes me a terrorist. Wired has a spectacular and detailed article about the difficulties facing home science enthusiasts these days - to buy a couple Erlenmeyer flasks is to be flagged as a producer of crystal meth, and to go so far as to purchase sulfur, potassium perchlorate, and powdered aluminum in one go is to presumptively contravene the Federal Hazardous Substances Act. We are living in strange days if the Feds are raiding private homes and carting off science stuff in the name of national security, but it's undeniably happening. As a consequence, the chilling effects are making it harder and harder (in this age where the drumbeat goes "America is losing its edge in science!") to do nifty stuff at home that kids can take with them to MIT, CalTech, or, hell, even little Hiram College, the Harvard of the Midwest.

American society in general has taken some great steps forward in ensuring the safety of young children. Many of the laws enacted to protect kids more or less do that job. But for my dollar, just as I oughta be able to smoke a fat doob in the comfort of my own living room and watch Blazing Saddles, and just as I oughta be able to procure Vioxx for myself if that's what takes care of the chronic pain that keeps me from any kind of rewarding life and I'm fully aware of the risks of heart attack that I am taking on, I oughta be able to spend some time with my kid making stinks, crystals, and small scale bangs in the garage.

Glenn Reynolds has been posting recently about a few books that I'm surely going to keep around the house: the recently published The Dangerous Book for Boys and 211 Things a Bright Boy Can Do, and The American Boy's Handy Book, originally published in 1888 and featuring all manner of entertainingly dated knowledge like how to make a blowgun, and the rudiments of home taxidermy.

I can't in good conscience raise children who can't use a screwdriver, can't light a fire with two matches, have never made a home volcano, and have never had the oh-shit thrill of packing a D size rocket engine inside a B-rated model rocket and watching that sonofabitch fly high and drift at least a half-mile off course into the housing development three treelines away. It wouldn't be American.

Drunkle Hitch has, as expected, weighed in on the passing of Jerry Falwell. I'm not one to speak ill of the dead, but I do loves me a good savage rant from everyone's favorite lit'ry critic and erstwhilely leftist drunken uncle!

"The evil that he did will live after him."

Someone buy that man another Remy Martin!!

Via Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings, I have found a site that appears to be nothing but the Sunday morning talking head shows translated into l33t$p3@|.

Ch-ch-check it:

Russert: dood teh American people think the Iraq war was a mistake

McCain: well you know the American people think failure is teh suck

Russert: well why not

McCain: yeah but teh people dont get teh consequences of failure

Russert: teh people hate u and yur policies

McCain: kurds, turks, Saudis will go to war and then we'll have to partition bedrooms in Iraq if we do that they'll follow us in to American bedrooms

Timmeh: wow

McCain: i luv shock and awe but its true bush is a terrible president and it was all mismanaged - for that i blame Donald Rumsfeld

Timmeh: but not Bush of course

McCain: at the time we went to war given what the British said we had to invade iraq

Timmeh: thats it?

MCcain: also the Oil-for-Food program was breaking down

Timmeh: yur joking right

McCain: hey if we had known we'd fail well sure you wouldn't invade

Timmy: sorry yur confusing me

McCain: Al Qaeda is in Baghdad but we're making progress - they're in other areas too

Timmeh: excellent but iraqi parliament wants us to leave

McCain: yeah but its in our interest to honor teh troops by not debating over and over and over again teh stooped boring Iraq war

Tim: huh?

McCain: fuck the Iraqi parliament

Tim: oh ok

McCain: those fuckers are just playing to their base I’ve had it with this fucking democracy i saw all this in vietnam

Tim: yeah like in Platoon and the Killing Fields

McCain: clearly the democracy in Iraq is undermining our effort to establish a democracy in Iraq

Tim: how the fuck long is it going to take

McCain: well we fought a bloody civil war 100 years after the Revolution in 1776 so you figure it out

That's about the tone of 'em, neh?

Can you imagine the pressure, being the heir apparent to immortal greatness? That kind of thing can do a man in.

Robert “Junior” Lockwood was more than just a close personal friend of the great Delta bluesman Robert Johnson. Due to an on-and-off ten year romantic entanglement between Lockwood's mother and the dashing, skylarking Mr. Johnson, Lockwood found himself with a big brother, a stepfather of sorts, and a musical mentor who would teach him all the tricks he had to tell. It was this relationship that gave Lockwood his “Robert Junior” nickname and the keys to his future.

And as with most such family dramas, it would be wonderful to write that the three of them, Robert, Robert Junior and mom, retired to a long and happy life on a farm somewhere in Arkansas or western Mississippi and ended their days in the company of beloved friends and family.

But instead, Robert Johnson found himself dying in a warm Mississippi night, poisoned by the jilted partner of one his many female companions, Robert Junior found his way out of the Delta by feet and inches, and only his mother had a shot at the idyllic storybook ending (God only knows if she got it).

As it turned out, Robert “Junior” Lockwood, heir to immortal greatness, was made of pretty stern stuff. Armed with all the tricks of music and showmanship he'd learned from his mentor, and cut loose from home at a fairly young age, he made a name for himself in juke joints and fish fries up and down the big river, wound his slow way North, and eventually became the go-to guitarist for dozens of recording sessions in the golden age of the Chicago blues.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Lockwood appeared with some of the all time greats of the Chicago blues style, like Sonny Boy Williamson, Otis Spann, Willie Dixon, Little Walter and even Muddy Waters, adding what needed to be added, always staying out of the spotlight. Along the way he continued to teach himself more about the guitar, getting jazz lines and chords under his fingers, even mastering the art of the blues on the notoriously cumbersome 12-string guitar.

In the wake of Lockwood's death late last year, the Delmark label is reissuing once again their CD release of his first session as a bandleader, Steady Rollin' Man, recorded in 1970.

I have to admit, I was all set to politely pan this album. Its plainer moments are nice enough, sure, but not really incredibly distinct from any one of dozens of worthy Chicago blues albums recorded in the last half-century. But then I found myself walking down the street on a cloudless Massachusetts afternoon, with the sunlight slanting just so from the west and a beautiful melancholy mood coming down, and the song playing in my head was Robert "Junior" Lockwood's "Western Horizon."

Structurally, the song is nothing more than a stock Chicago blues by way of the Delta: start the song with the little turnaround where one voice descends chromatically from the flat-7 to the dominant, kick in the twelve bar shuffle vamp, and then cue a lyric whose first two lines are the same and begin with "I believe, I believe... I believe I'll...."

Trust me, you know this song. Whether it's sung as "Sweet Home Chicago" or "Dust My Broom" or any one of dozens of alternate lyrics, you know this song.

But what I forgot when I got ready to politely pan the album is that in this kind of blues, it's all in the details - the bent notes, the vibe of the song, the little turns of lyric and phrasing that make a blue performance just right.

And there's lots in "Western Horizon" that is definitely right. Lockwood studied jazz, and you can hear it sometimes in the way he pulls a phrase behind the beat, the way he swings a line, the way he builds some altered harmonies into his rhythm vamps. On “Western Horizon,” he sings behind the beat and then creeps right up to it, rushes some words and draws others out, and generally sounds like he was born singing the song in that same unhurried way. The effect is cool and stylish, and is a neat twist on top of the late-night saloon mood that he and the band kick up on this song and the album in general.

And what a band! For this session, Lockwood tapped some of the best that Chicago had to offer - Fred Below on drums, Dave Myers on bass, and Louis Myers on second guitar. The arrangements and tempos they dig into are less aggressive, less slick, than some of the work that Lockwood was doing as a session man around the same time.

Instead, Lockwood and the band let a whiff of country mud into their jazzy urban blues by laying back into grooves, moving some of the rhythm playing up the neck of the guitar (like Junior's ‘godfather’ used to do) and pulling out some great old turnaround riffs that could have come straight from the pines of Arkansas in 1937. On the slower grooves, like "Take a Little Walk With Me," "Mean Red Spider" and "Western Horizon," the band sit back in a simmer that showcases their sedate rock-steadiness and country overtones. But on the jump blues numbers like the overtly jazzy "Lockwood's Boogie" they sit right up in the pocket and deliver all the energy you could ever want to power a Chicago blues bar.

With repeated listens, the jazz elements drift to the front of the record. Jazz harmonies and a cool late-night vibe are all over songs like the instrumental "Tanya" and even the by-the-numbers "Take a Little Walk With Me" and "Steady Rollin' Man," and Lockwood's solos on any song may at any point quietly pass over from basic pentatonic flat-five scales into something that's no longer just the blues. The cumulative effect is pretty impressive, a nice balance of influences that don't often play well together but on this album fit together almost seamlessly.

So, okay. Maybe there are one or two too many straight-ahead numbers on this disc which sap a little energy from the running order. But that really doesn't hide the fact that I was wrong, and that Steady Rollin' Man is a minor masterpiece of the blues, pulling together the city, the country, and even jazz into one unassuming and masterful demonstration of why Robert “Junior” Lockwood was thought so highly of. Good stuff.