Lifestream

Starting The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.  Wish me luck, everyone.

I cannot use Regina Spektor as background music.  Engages the brain way too much.

"Sleeping in Light" is a lovely turn of phrase.  And a lovely ending to Babylon 5.

As I've mentioned before, I've recently switched to pelican as my blogging engine.

Pelican is a static site generator. This means that it generates static HTML files using templates and content as input, which can be then uploaded (via rsync, for example) to a plain vanilla web server (I use nginx).

So far the experience has been fairly smooth. The web server setup is much simpler, since there's no application to run. And it's forced me to re-think what kinds of information I want on my pages. For example, in an effort to avoid regenerating the entire site every time I publish an article, I created standalone index pages for tags, categories and archives rather than display the counts on every page.

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Yes, it's a bit irrational to be mad at people who are 2500 years dead, but now I want to read The Iliad just to piss off Plato and Socrates

Surprise #1 while reading The Republic: Plato asserting, via Socrates, that the Iliad is unsuitable as literature in his ideal state.

Lindor chocolates look like little brown Death Stars.

...but I've just discovered it hiding under all the bean sprouts, and now I feel guilty.

I was bitterly complaining in my head about how this Ramen soup did not have any egg..

Continuing in my attempt to document the mixers and liqueurs I've been sampling recently, I will now focus on Benedictine, a French, brandy-based, herbal liqueur.

The name conjures up images of secluded monks guarding secret recipes handed down for generations (see my article about Chartreuse, another monastically themed libation, for a similar background) but according to Wikipedia the real story is a bit more prosaic: it was apparently invented by wine merchant and industrialist Alexandre Le Grand who later tried to link his concoction with the Benedictine Abbey of Fécamp in Normandy to boost sales.

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About a year ago, I bought a bottle of green Chartreuse. I bought it because I stumbled upon something called a Bijou cocktail and decided that I wanted to try it.

Chartreuse is a liqueur made by French monks from a secret recipe purported to be hundreds of years old. It's usually described as tasting "herbal", but I find that's about as useful as saying that something tastes like "chicken"; it's the word you use when you can't think of anything else to say. For my money, I find that it's very sweet and tastes strongly of anise (which I don't mind; I like Drambuie, which also has a strong anise flavour) but also has a kind of "vegetable" aftertaste that I find a bit off putting,

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The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, David Embury's classic, is notable for being somewhat rigid in its definition of a cocktail. He basically divides all of cocktail-dom into two camps: the aromatic ones (Manhattans, Martinis, Old-Fashioneds), and the sour ones (basically anything with lemon or lime juice in it, though never enough to overpower the main liquor).

For Embury, a cocktail is consumed before dinner, stimulates the appetite, and isn't very sweet - or it isn't a cocktail. As such, though mixed drinks like the Brandy Alexander and its cousins do show up on the pages of his book, they are (justifiably, though somewhat condescendingly) classified as desserts when made the traditional way (equal parts brandy, cream and creme de cacao) or grudgingly allowed to stand alongside the real cocktails when made according to his modifications (basically upping the brandy by four times the usual amount relative to the other ingredients) - though with a loud admonition that the result is vastly inferior to his tried and true favourites.

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Is it just me or is pound cake basically Shortbread with eggs?

Lately I've been experimenting with "mixers". By "mixer" I mean aperitifs, liqueurs, and digestifs that almost always appear as secondary ingredients in a cocktail, but that one almost never thinks of drinking on their own. The intention here is to write a series of articles about each one.

It started with the Vesper, a mixed drink well known in cocktail circles. The recipe comes from an iconic scene in Ian Flemings's Casino Royale, where Bond instructs the bartender as follows:

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After a good run, I've decided to retire YAWT for the time being. I found the workflow I set up to be a bit complicated, and I found myself wanting to concentrate more on writing rather than the nitty-gritty of publishing. I also got a bit tired of the lone wolf thing and I wanted to try using piece of software that other people actually use.

But I still liked the basics of my workflow. I still liked writing blog entries with a standard text editor (Emacs in my case). I still liked the idea of keeping my site under source control, as plain files. In other words, I did not want to switch to Wordpress.

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The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: possibly the first time I've ever seen an Ayn Rand reference in a science fiction novel.

I didn't even watch the debate. Still though: NO YOU'RE THE PUPPET!

UNBELIEVABLE COMPANY!

I HAVE A WINNING TEMPERAMENT!

' "She doesn't have the stamina" says the guy who has been sniffling all night.'

And I fear that if the last year wasn't enough to show Trump the door, this debate isn't going to do it (though it clearly should)

NOBODY CALLS SEAN HANNITY!

TREMENDOUS JOBS!

The thing is, this debate was basically just more of the same.

HACK INTO AMERICANS!  Crap that was Hilary...