Archives: July 01, 2007

The 'V' word

Sunday, 29 July 2007 06:20 PM

For some time now, I've had the nagging feeling that I have made a mistake.

Of course I make lots of mistakes, with both good and bad results -- hence the title of this blog -- but this particular mistake is one I've made over and over, and it's of the bad variety.

The mistake is that I have been mean to vermouth.

"Mean" isn't quite the right word, but it's close. I've ignored vermouth, made fun of it, argued with people who held that it has merit, and made faces when anyone put it in or even near my drink.

But lately, I've begun to pay more attention to those who would stand up for poor vermouth (such as here and here). After all, it's been around for centuries. Surely all those bartenders and cocktail drinkers can't be completely without taste.

And then I'd add a little vermouth to my Martinis, and I'd be disappointed again with the nasty, sticky flavor that got in the way of my gin.

I started to wonder if the problem was not vermouth as a whole, but the bottle of it that I was using. If cheap gin is nothing compared to pricier types, the same was likely to be true of vermouth. Unfortunately, the selection of vermouths available in my area is very limited. I searched around for Noilly Pratt, which seems to be the most generally favored, but the stores around here don't carry it. Old standby Martini & Rossi turns out to be the top of the line in Pennsylvania liquor stores.

Still, maybe it wasn't just the brand. So I bought a new bottle of Martini & Rossi, poured one glass of it and another from the year-old bottle sitting in my liquor cabinet, and had a look. Here's the result: new bottle on the left, old on the right.

Yikes.

I could taste and smell a big difference as well: The old vermouth is sour and cloying, which the new stuff is light and sweet, clean on the tongue, kind of like a softer white wine.

I mixed up a Martini and found the fresh vermouth combined in a friendly way with my Plymouth gin, adding layers to the drink's flavor. Then I made another with a dash of Pernod (Have you tried adding a little Pernod to your Martini? Oh my, it's good.), and the whole thing was happy, smooth, and complex, as a good cocktail should be.

I've since found that a little glass of vermouth, chilled by an ice cube, is a fine thing to sip while I fix dinner -- it raises the spirits and whets the appetite, and thanks to a lower alcohol content it puts me less at risk of cutting off a finger or setting the house afire.

So, apparently my trouble is not with vermouth, but with skunked vermouth. The real mistake I've made is not caring for my dry vermouth properly. I now store dry vermouth in the fridge and try to drink it within six months of opening.

Thanks to my new appreciation for it, especially as an aperitif, consuming a bottle in a few months is not a problem at all.

We are not alone

Wednesday, 25 July 2007 11:20 AM

I grew up in a house just five miles from where I live now. My childhood home was surrounded by farmland. Sometimes the cows next door would escape their pasture and wander onto our property to eat apples on the edge of our woods, and I spent summer afternoons lifting up mossy logs to look for salamanders.

These days I live in town -- it's a small town, but a town all the same. I'm surrounded by sidewalks, and there's nary a mossy log in sight. But there's still a fair amount of wildlife nearby. For example, I found this on my back door. It's too big to be a cat print, and too articulated to be a dog print.

Having just finished the recent Harry Potter book, I'm tempted to think of house elves. Wouldn't it be nice if some cousin of Dobby was looking for a new job?

But no. My visitor is likely to be a raccoon -- and a pretty big one, considering the size of the prints that lead up the stairs to the door, and then across the deck.

My trash cans are inside the garage and there's nowhere in the immediate vicinity for him to have created a nest or den or whatever, so I think (hope) he was just passing through.

Not all my wild visitors are so large. I also seem to have a bunch of praying mantises in the yard. The first one I saw was small, only about an inch long. They're bigger now, and they have been exploring the area. Here's a shot from my basement office, looking out as one of them looks in.

I see one or two about once a week, and each time they've grown a little bit. Last year there had been at least two in the area -- my cats caught one, and another stalked around the deck catching bees and bugs -- and those mature mantises were each about four inches long. So I know the little ones have a ways to go.

Critical caffeine update: Peet's on sale at Giant Eagle

Tuesday, 24 July 2007 02:12 PM

If my recent raptures about Peet's Coffee have tempted you to try the stuff, but you've been wary of the high cost, please take note. Until tomorrow (July 25), Giant Eagle is offering $3 off Peet's. Note that you must have a Giant Eagle Advantage card to get the discount.

And! They have Major Dickason's Blend in whole beans now, as well as the House Blend. Woo!

Sunday videos -- Fionn Regan

Sunday, 22 July 2007 12:19 PM

For unexplained reasons, iTunes will not let me buy anything this morning. Thus, I cannot purchase "The End of History" by Fionn Regan. I've just learned about it (ads and banners on the web work at least some of the time), and it sounds interesting and singer-songerwriterish, nice for a summer Sunday. But iTunes says I must wait a while and try again.

Fortunately, Youtube is willing to let me watch a couple of videos from the album, and even to share them with you.

"Put a Penny in a Slot"

"Be Good or Be Gone"

Spoiler-free notes on "HP and the Deathly Hallows"

Sunday, 22 July 2007 11:30 AM

Not that it was a race, but I finished the Potter book yesterday in about 12 hours, taking a couple of breaks to eat and run errands. I usually plan to spread such books over at least a couple of days, but this time I decided from the start that I would read it straight through.

I don't feel a need to mourn the series or the characters. I enjoyed the book, and at the same time I'm glad it's done. Other books have affected me more -- I wanted "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" never to end, and "Infinite Jest" as well, to name two other doorstop-type recent novels.

But I like the world J.K. Rowling created, her invention and puns, and the choices she made in sticking to and deviating from the classic hero's journey storyline. I find her writing in the last book to be better than any of the others along the way.

It's not a series one can pop into at any time; you have to start at the beginning to appreciate the end. There's little I can say about the end without spoiling it for others, but I think I'm safe in revealing that the end fits the series as well as I might have hoped.

Pimp my daemon

Friday, 20 July 2007 05:05 PM

According to the people making the film adaptation of Philip Pullman's novel, I am a study in contradictions. How can I be both proud and modest? Or shy and assertive? Please clean up this mess with your perceptions of me by clicking the above movie and answering a couple of questions.

I hope I don't end up with a gibbon.

UPDATE: Ooh, my daemon has changed! The name and description are the same, but where I had a big tiger before, now I have an ocelot or some other middle-sized cat.

UPDATE 2: And now it's a mouse. Are people really convinced that I'm shy? Or in the PUllman novel are the bossy daemons the mice and other small critters?

(Title of this post and link blatantly stolen from Radosh.net.)

Exploring the wonderful world of Physics

Monday, 16 July 2007 02:07 PM

Today at lunch, my brother Anthony wondered aloud whether PNC Park allows one to bring a whole apple into the game, or only a cut-up apple.

"What difference would it make?" I asked.

"You can throw whole fruit farther," he said. "It weighs more."

"The weight shouldn't make any difference. A slice of apple has roughly the same mass per volume as a whole apple. They should travel the same distance. "

"I'm telling you that I can throw a baseball way farther than I can throw this slice or apple, and a baseball is like a whole apple."

"Maybe the shape would affect it. The spin reducing the friction from the air," I said.

"I think it has more to do with the relationship between the size of my hand and the size of the apple slice," he said.

"There is no way that has anything to do with it."

So we conducted a short experiment. I didn't want to waste a perfectly good apple, so we used a de-zested, dried out orange that I was planning to throw out anyway. It was close to the weight and shape of the apple. We went to the alley that runs along my house, and Anthony threw first the apple slice and then the orange.

Result: The apple slice traveled about 60% of the distance the dried-out orange traveled. This was less of a difference in distance than Anthony had expected, and more than I had expected. I still believe the shape of the objects played a big role. The round orange had less surface area for its mass, while the apple slice with its flat size had much more surface and would have met more resistance from the air.

Of course, our experimental design was completely crap, as the trial was riddled with errors. The alley slopes upward steeply, so Anthony had to throw uphill, which means the arcs of the projectiles were cut short on the far end. The orange would have landed several feet farther on if the surface had been flat. And there's no way to know if the force of Anthony's throws was consistent; had we been more scientific we'd have used a device for throwing or run more trials and averaged the results. To remove shape from the test we should have trimmed the apple slice into a round shape. But then we'd also need to make sure both objects had the same surfaces; a peeled apple and a small, round piece of apple would have been the best test objects. And of course we didn't control for the effects of wind either.

But still, we were satisfied that we had explored the question and achieved an interesting result.

When we returned to the office, Anthony took another approach to answering the question. As it turns out, fans are permitted to bring both whole fruit and sliced fruit to the ballpark, as long as the total food brought fits into a 16"x16"x8" soft-sided bag.

Oh, wondrously caffeinated day!

Tuesday, 10 July 2007 02:50 PM

Look what I discovered at the local Giant Eagle this weekend:

There, amid the various overpriced coffees, it's Peet's! My much-loved, much-missed favorite brew from the west coast.

Two unfortunate things: Most of the Peet's varieties on offer here are pre-ground; only the House Blend comes as whole beans. And the price is higher than any of the other coffees in the store.

But even at this higher price they're less expensive than mail order. I'm trying to drink less coffee these days, but a cup of java in the afternoon has suddenly become tempting again.

The long goodbye

Tuesday, 10 July 2007 02:28 PM

Stephen King says goodbye to Harry Potter:

When it comes to Harry, part of me — a fairly large part, actually — can hardly bear to say goodbye. I'd guess that J.K. Rowling feels the same, although I'd also guess those feelings are mingled with the relief of knowing that the work is finally done, for better or worse.

And I'm a grown-up, for God's sake — a damn Muggle! Think how it must be for all the kids who were 8 when Harry debuted in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, with its cartoon jacket and modest (500 copies) first edition. Those kids are now 18, and when they close the final book, they will be in some measure closing the book on their own childhoods — magic summers spent in the porch swing, or reading under the covers at camp with flashlights in hand, or listening to Jim Dale's recordings on long drives to see Grandma in Cincinnati or Uncle Bob in Wichita. My advice to families containing Harry Potter readers: Stock up on the Kleenex. You're gonna need it.

(Link via Coudal.)

Copyright © 2004 – 2007 Cynthia Closkey