SF/F, sociology, some recipes. Updates every other Friday.
Guan Yin, Bodhisattva of Mercy
I love my religion. My saints have indiscretions.
And now, wrapping up ‘apparently controversial nerd dating week,’ I’m going to Teach the Controversy (TM) and provide both sides of an argument. First, this old chestnut from the Best of Craigslist:
I just discovered Geek’s Dream Girl, and while I’m leery of paying for the service (mostly as I have no money), I found the articles to be often funny and usually informative.
Being, as I am, more than passingly familiar with the Pickup Artist community, I found this article to be hilarious. I swear I’ve heard this all said before in complete seriousness.
Continuing this week’s (entirely unintentional) theme of geek love reposts, here’s one that I found pretty damned hilarious over at Awkward Things I Say to Girls:
For the thirty of you who’ve already checked out yesterday’s article (and those in the future) you may find the following link relevant: Sex researchers (who are, surprisingly, not Swedish) have discovered that the flush of horniness hormones from a new relationship wear off after two years. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
Reposted from The Park Bench:
This week starts off Tales of China. There is a rich heritage of stories from the Five Glorious Millenia of Chinese history, some encapsulated in the Thirty-Six Strategems, some parables from the religions dharmic and daoic, and some simply enduring through the countless retellings.
And nobody in this country knows them. Say “Guan Yu,” they say “Guan who?” The Boston opera is putting on Madame White Snake this weekend, but these stories are not to be crystallized in art like a singer’s breath on a cold Suzhou morning. They’re meant to be told, for their players to enter and exit anew in each mind and each fervent telling, like the stories of Achilles and Hector, Ruth and Naomi, Sam and Frodo, MacBeth and Valjean and Don Quixote.
And, speaking of these classical, tragic heroes, your first Tale of China is almost Greek in its composition. It’s the tale of man against the Gods, and when the Gods trembled and knew fear. From a slim little volume called The Eight Immortals of Taoism, this is the story of Pai Shih.
So, last November, I brewed some beer. This was ‘my’ first beer, a Belgian Golden Strong Ale based on my favorite beer of all time, La Fin du Monde. The other guys in the house (Charlie and Lenker) are both old hands at homebrewing, so while I picked the recipe, and we did a few things none of us had done before, they were the biggest part of making the beer.
Our first indication that this was not a normal beer was that it bubbled over while fermenting. The second was that it was still fermenting two and a half weeks later. To put that in perspective, the other beers we brew are done in as little as ten days. When we transferred it from one container to another (a process called double fermenting), we sampled a bit.
It was kind of like a large Frenchman stripping his shirt, sidling up to you shouting “BATTONS-NOUS!” and clocking you with an uppercut of alcohol and a roundhouse fulla sugar. Two important things happened that day: first, we realized we DEFINITELY need to double-ferment my Belgian Ales, and second, that we could make the second batch with maple syrup instead of sugar.
So we let it sit for another three weeks (it seemed very excitable to be in its new container at first) and kegged it and we bottled half of it. I was going to send the bottles to Marissa, but she wanted me to send books instead. So I had all these bottles of my homemade beer, Le Chinatown, just sitting around. So, having told people about it, I gave them away.
This turned out to be just about the best idea I’ve ever had. The beer was quite good straight out of the keg, and pretty fine once we’d let it sit another week or so. But it really came into its own out of the bottle. Stronger, smoother, punchier.
And the people who drank it wanted more. And the people they told about it wanted to try it. And I couldn’t afford ingredients, so I told them that if they bought stock in the grains, yeast, water, and bottles, I’d get them the finished product.
That was late January.
I sold out shares of batch two, L’héritage, pretty quick. A friend approached me two and bought ALL the stock of batch three, Ma Blonde, via PayPal. And today, one of the investors in L’héritage shoved a twenty in my hand to secure a few bottles of “the next thing you do.”
I have more people wanting to buy my beer than my ability to to make beer. I’m amazed and delighted. And wondering how to build this up successfully…what permits do I need to open my own microbrewery? 😀
Brasserie Mathieu…has a nice ring to it…
This is one of those folktales I always mention in conversation, then always have to explain. It’s the most famous myth in Québec, even providing the labels on a certain brand of beer. It’s the story of French-Canadian lumberjacks one New Year’s night, driven to the devil to be back home in Montréal, and what it cost them…
This version comes to us from americanfolktales.net, but I’ve altered the ending slightly to the version that I’ve heard. Enjoy.
This week’s Red Penny story comes from an old and trusty friend, D. L. Ashliman’s massive collection of folktales. This is his rendition of the old legend of the golem, an old story that’s been worn a bit with age and retellings, but this version is as fresh and strange as the first telling…
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