Last night I got to see the Cubs win their home closer. I'll have photos this weekend.
After the game I played a game of Euchre at a local pub, and got dealt an extraordinary: Right bower, left bower, trump ace, trump king, off ace. This hand is literally the second-best hand possible in the game. (Having trump queen instead of an off ace would be best.*) I made only one mistake: instead of slamming down all five cards at once and grinning stupidly, I slammed down the top four cards, grinned stupidly, and then got upbraided by my partner for not dropping the whole load at once.
We went on to win the game 10-4, so my partner didn't upbraid me much.
Fun night.
* As a reader pointed out, this is not technically true. Any other trump card would have the same effect as the off-ace, since any other trump in the game would be exposed when I played the right and left bowers. Yes, my readers are that nerdy.
CityLabs' Laura Bliss wonders if straight-sided pint glasses should go away:
Let's start at the beginning. A shaker glass was, and is, the 16-ounce glass half of a Boston cocktail shaker. They've been stocked behind bars for mixing drinks since the early 20th century, long before their takeover of American draft, as if waiting in the wings.
Enter the post-War years, a time when American beer entered a long, steady decline. Prohibition had forced the vast majority of small breweries out of business, leaving mostly larger brands like Schlitz, Anheuser-Busch, and Coors in operation. If you wanted a draft beer, this meant you were kind of drinking yellow, flavorless stuff—and in large quantities, since it had such low alcohol content.
Garrett Oliver, brewmaster at The Brooklyn Brewery and author of the Oxford Companion to Beer, surmises that this dearth of quality beer (though with plenty of mass-market brew to go round) was the shaker glass's opportunity to rise. Why bother with a fancy glass when you're drinking nothing special? "Complaining that your glass wasn't good enough for your beer would have been like complaining your paper plate wasn't good enough for Wonder Bread," he says.
[The proper] glass is a tulip, Oliver explained, in which the beer's complex flavors and aromas can escape, and where a nice head of foam can form. The shaker glass, detractors point out, functionally negates both of those things from happening, with its wide mouth and straight edges. Fancier glasses do more to promote the beer's aesthetic qualities.
On the other hand, the glasses are very convenient for bar owners, they're sturdy, and they're unpretentious. So no, they're not going anywhere.
Poor Parker. I picked him up from boarding yesterday afternoon, and he had to go back again this morning. I've got a one-day trip to Pittsburgh early tomorrow morning. So not a lot of time at home.
Today's lighter at work than any last week, fortunately. Just prepping for tomorrow.
I'm hoping for a more regular, Chicago-based schedule once my project kicks off again.
One of my oldest surviving friends is getting married this weekend in the southwestern corner of Michigan. Fortunately they have WiFi. Also fortunately I won't be stuck inside doing work tomorrow, because we ran flat-out today to finish a deliverable.
I'll get photos and such up when I can. I forgot my real camera, but my phone does fine in a pinch.
Yesterday I got accepted into the Apollo Chorus in Chicago.
Apollo performs Händel's "Messiah" every year at Chicago's Orchestra Hall. This year we're also doing Schubert's Mass in A-flat, plus a number of South American works in the spring, plus a performance to celebrate the Auditorium Theater's 125th anniversary.
I'll have more as the season goes on.
Oh, and: subscribe!
The Chicagoist reports that new FDA regulations may curdle the raw-cheese market:
...due to the FDA’s decision to change the allowance for non-toxigenic Escherichia coli (E. coli) in dairy products. Non-toxigenic E. coli is a typically harmless bacterium found in the human gastrointestinal tracts as well as in raw milk cheeses. Recently, the FDA changed their allowance for this bacteria from a Most Probable Number (MPN) of 100 per gram, a fairly average amount in raw cheese, to 10 MPN per gram. Because of this drastic decrease, Roquefort and other cheeses such as raw milk versions of Morbier and Tommes de Savoie are now on Import Alert. The cheeses are held on Detention without Physical Examination, the FDA's infamous "red list."
The FDA is detaining the raw milk cheeses in order to take at least 1,600 samples. Their goal is to determine how often certain foods, specifically raw milk cheeses, are liable to become contaminated under the new definition. ... The FDA wrote this letter to the American Cheese Society, outlining their objectives in this study.
Fortunately, the U.K. still exists allows raw cheeses to be sold. Unfortunately, the U.K. still has a bit of BSE floating around....
Birthday dinner last night at Tru followed by burlesque. I have wonderful friends.
CityLab's Kriston Capps wants to stop Florentijn Hofman:
The Dutch artist has just debuted, and I cannot believe I am about to write this word, HippopoThames, a wooden hippo river sculpture headlining a festival on the Thames. At least, that's what it's doing this week. In the months to come, you might find it on the Yangtze or the Ganges or the Rhône.
Rubber Duck, on the other hand—that's the floatation for which Hofman is best known—is a decidedly Western fixture. Los Angeles sculptor Peter Ganine patented the design for the original toy duck in 1947 and went on to sell millions of them. A generation later, Jim Henson breathed life into the rubber duckie with the greatest song about bath time ever recorded: "Rubber Duckie" only lost the 1971 Grammy Award for best children's recording because the statue went to the full Sesame Street album featuring the song.
Cities that cash in with Rubber Duck are outsourcing their public art, meaning they aren't doing their artists or themselves any favors in the long run. In the same sense that building another Ferris wheel is a sure bet—if one that emblandens a city—tugging the same old Holman into the bay is a lost opportunity for a place to reach for greatness. Creativity is and ought to be a source of pride for cities as diverse as London, Beijing, and Los Angeles—and an engine for their economies. When I see images of it floating in a new harbor, I can almost hear Rubber Duck whispering, in a raspy duck voice: The place you love is no more.
The worst part of this story is, now I've got the Bert & Ernie song in my head...
On those rare occasions when I opt for it, I usually enjoy having in-flight WiFi. At this particular moment, however, I'm staring down another two hours of flying time with WiFi throughput under 200 kbps. That speed reminds me of the late 1990s. You know, half the Web ago.
This is painful. I'm not streaming video, nor am I connected to a remote server like the guy next to me. I'm just trying to get some documents written. I believe I will have to write a complaint to GoGo Inflight, as this throughput is completely unacceptable.
But enough about that minor sadness; I've found something truly horrible.
Everyone who took English 1 at my college had to read George Orwell's Politics and the English Language. (I would actually extend this mandate to everyone on the planet who speaks English if I had the power.) In the essay, Orwell calls out a specific passage from Ecclesiastes to show how business English can destroy thought:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
He renders it in modern English thus:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
Two things. First, "modern" English in 1946 seems a lot like modern English in 2014. Frighteningly so.
Second, there are worse translations of that passage in actual, printed Bibles. Now, I'm not a religious person, as even a causal reader of this blog knows. But I have an appreciation for language. So it pains me to see that some people learned Ecclesiastes 9:11 like this:
I saw something else under the sun. The race isn't [won] by fast runners, or the battle by heroes. Wise people don't necessarily have food. Intelligent people don't necessarily have riches, and skilled people don't necessarily receive special treatment. But time and unpredictable events overtake all of them.
("GOD'S WORD® Translation")
Or this:
I have observed something else under the sun. The fastest runner doesn't always win the race, and the strongest warrior doesn't always win the battle. The wise sometimes go hungry, and the skillful are not necessarily wealthy. And those who are educated don't always lead successful lives. It is all decided by chance, by being in the right place at the right time.
NO! No, no, NO! This isn't a children's book. Why does anyone need to dumb it down? I mean, fine, vernacular and all, but can't we at least keep the poetry?
It's no wonder the religious right have such poor cognitive skills. The one book they were allowed to read as children has been reduced to pabulum.
Someimes—rarely—I disconnect for a couple of days. This past weekend I basically just hung out, walked my dog, went shopping, and had a perfectly nice absence from the Web.
Unfortunately that meant I had something like 200 RSS articles to plough through, and I just couldn't bring myself to stop dealing with (most) emails. And I have a few articles to read:
Now back to your regularly-scheduled week, already in progress...