Beer Poking

By | January 20, 2025

A mug of Stone Corral "MEXICAN CHOCOLATE MOUSSE CAKE" beer, after poking

Today was of course a day of somber regret and desperation, as the Orange Dickhead became President again. I did not watch one single moment of the inauguration and I am not hanging on tenterhooks doomscrolling through his “first day” actions on X (née Twitter).

Instead, I focused on house tidying and other such things while idly contemplating how the lessons of Martin Luther King Jr. are willfully overlooked by an increasing percentage of our population.

I reformatted and installed fresh images on two older laptops I intend to donate to the local charity who takes such things. One of them was a Windows 10 laptop that was never going to take Windows 11 but who knows, someone might find a use for it.

I worked on decluttering and tossing out various unneeded tchotchkes that have been lying around gathering dust. I am, regrettably, an acquirer of tchotchkes.

I picked up a couple of loaves of challah that our local synagogue and Quakers were selling as a fundraiser — you pay in advance and then go get your loaves out of a cooler on someone’s porch when the pickup day comes. I’m sure it’s not that unusual, but still, it seems kind of Vermont-y to me to drive one’s car up to someone’s house after dark, crunch one’s way through the snow and up their steps, fish a couple of half-frozen loaves of challah out of a cooler, cross one’s name off a list on a clipboard, then retrace one’s steps and so on to home.

I took some caffeinated teabags to our church and put them in the big multi-compartment tea box that we put out during hospitality time. It’d gotten to the point that there was literally nothing in that box other than rooibos tea, decaffeinated tea, and chamomile tea. I am sure people enjoy those — I do, even — but there are often times that you want to have something with caffeine, especially after sitting through a 75-minute church service in a warm sanctuary. Sometimes you just have to do things yourself, so I took by some Constant Comment, some Earl Grey, and a whole bunch of chai teabags. Our long national nightmare is over.

But the highlight of the day was the beer poking at our local microbrewery, Stone Corral. I believe I can safely count myself among the vast majority of Richmonders who had never heard of such a thing as “beer poking” until very very recently. Stone Corral put out a listing in the local community forum five days ago — “beer poking from 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm on Monday the 20th”. I thought the choice of date and time was odd until I remembered that a lot of folks, me included, get MLK Day off — and that if there was ever a day to consume alcohol, it would be the 2024 Inauguration Day.

What is beer poking? Allow me to quote from the event listing:

“Make the most of a chilly winter day and join us to celebrate a centuries-old winter tradition: Beer Poking! Dating back to 17th-century Germany, this practice involves heating a metal rod until red-hot and plunging it into a beer. The result? A warmed brew with a caramelized, toasted flavor that’s perfect for the season. There will be an outdoor fire, heaters, hot cocoa for the little ones, and of course — beer! Poking will be done 1pm — 4pm, don’t miss it!”

Carole and I got to the restaurant around 2 pm on a bitterly cold, sunny day. The parking lot was full of cars and smoke was rising from an open fire surrounded by curious onlookers. One had to go inside to get a mug of beer — per the restaurant, the darker the better — and then come out to get “poked”. Unsurprisingly — this is a small Vermont town, after all — I ran into multiple acquaintances while waiting in line. It was the high point of the day for everyone!

What was the “poked” beer actually like?

Well, theoretically the poking was supposed to partly caramelize the beer (hence the recommendation for a dark beer that would have lots of stuff to caramelize) and give it an interesting taste. I’m not really sure it did; it made for a warm head of froth atop the beer, but the beer itself (mine was an “Mexican Chocolate Cake Mousse” Imperial Stout) hadn’t changed that much. Still, there was some novelty value to it. Perhaps I should get a branding iron and build a big fire at my house some day and keep poking beer until I find the perfect duration to get the optimal result.

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So long, Mark

By | January 16, 2025

I am not going to be deleting my Facebook account, Instagram account, and Threads account just yet, but after the absolutely reprehensible things Meta and Zuckerberg did over the past few days, such as eliminating all transgender accomodations at Meta offices, discontinuing fact-checking, allowing users to refer to GLBTQ individuals as “mentally ill” and “freaks” and women as “property”, discontinuing Meta’s diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, removing all GLBTQ themes from Messenger… and so on, and so on, it’s obvious that any decent person has no business giving Meta and Zuckerberg a single click or penny of advertising revenue.

If there’s a palace revolution of some kind and Zuckerberg is put out on an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean, I might come back. But for now … if you want to find me, I’ll be at @jayfurr.bsky.social.

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Key West Trip

By | January 15, 2025

We recently took a 7-night trip to Key West, Florida. We arrived the Friday before Christmas and flew back the Friday after.

Highlights included: drinking, eating, bar crawling, more drinking, skydiving, boating (twice, on boats we drove ourselves), going to church on Christmas Eve, visiting Fred the Tree on the old Seven-Mile Bridge, miniature golfing, and more drinking. We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast just off Duval Street, literally overlooking the Hemingway House. The day before we left, we made a trip to the Hemingway House and paid the admission, solely so we could walk around the grounds and molest as many of the sixty-odd cats living there as we could manage.


This was our room. It was small, no question. We’re pretty used to high-end hotels, and this was different — the (king-size) bed took up most of the room. But it was comfortable, with A/C we could control ourselves, and a small balcony that looked right over the pool of the Hemingway House. We could look at those cats (or the tourists who visited their abode) day or night. One night, I looked over and saw a bride-and-groom couple fleeing into the bathrooms for a quick break from their guests, presumably waiting for them at their reception on the opposite lawn.

The B&B had a separate entrance for every room, all named after European cities. We were in the Pamplona room. The central courtyard had a small pool, or essentially a long hot-tub, and they served breakfast on the pool deck. There was also an advertised “free happy hour” which turned out to be pretty minimal, beer and wine but no spirits.

But anyway, we enjoyed the visit and we’d stay there again, all other things being equal. Being a minute off Duval Street was very convenient, and surprisingly, there really wasn’t much noise to keep us up at night. We just have to get used to staying in a smaller accommodation, and maybe bringing less stuff. We do not know how to travel light. 🙂

And for kindness’ sake, we should promote our hosts: https://www.andrewsinn.com/

 

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Spontaneous Pain, Leg Edition

By | January 14, 2025
A man clutching his ankle as the ankle radiates little lightning bolts representing pain

I have had a throbbing, occasional pain just above my right ankle, on the outside of the leg, for a couple of years now. Probably screwed it up somehow doing a Susan G. Komen 3-Day or training for one or something. The pain comes and goes and can be pretty intense at times.

I finally saw a doctor about it and got X-rayed (they found nothing out of the ordinary) and wound up going to sports medicine and a rehab gym. Today the sports medicine people gave me an injection of some anti-inflammatory or another, right in the center of the pain in what they told me was a nerve cluster of some kind. I knew they had the spot dead center because as the needle went in and they began to inject whatever it was, the pain went THROBBA THROBBA in protest.

So I’m home now, sitting here working, and wasn’t expecting anything unusual. Turns out “unusual” is in the cards for today, as just now when I was talking to Carole on the phone I suddenly found myself going “HOLY F___, ARGH, F___, F____” and so on, right in Carole’s ear. Far from vanishing as the anti-inflammatory took effect, the pain was back with a vengeance… but this time as much more of a sharp, stabbing pain than had formerly been the case.

Yay!

It’s stopped for now and I sure as heck hope it doesn’t come back.

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Zara

By | January 13, 2025

I guess I’m not all bad if a kitty this nice is willing to hang out with me.

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Snow

By | January 10, 2025
Snow on the railing of our deck, with a tall snow-covered spruce tree behind it

Since I’ve posted about cold and snow recently, I thought I had better show you the end result of the most recent winter storm that came through northern Vermont. We got about a foot, or perhaps a little more as the snow had had a little time to compress by the time I took the photo above. It’s very fluffy snow but it’ll be good for snowshoeing after a day or two. I want to stress that this is in no way a complaint; it’s good for our economy when we get fresh snow and in any event, it beats hell out of wildfires such as the Los Angeles area is currently dealing with. It’s also nothing compared to the inconvenience and danger that a lot less snow presents when it falls in the South, where they have no idea how to drive in it and don’t even own snowplows and salt trucks. My prayers for everyone in LA and in Georgia and other places currently dealing with life-threatening situations.

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Many are cold, but few are frozen

By | January 9, 2025
Zara the kitty, sitting on a pillow with a snowy winter scene behind her

I am very stupid in certain ways. I live in a snowy northern clime (northern Vermont) but my Southern upbringing makes me want to get up in the morning, put on a t-shirt, underwear, and shorts and wander around the house barefoot all day.

There typically comes a point where I realize that continual boosting of the thermostat is ineffective and costly and that I should just, you know, put on a sweater or sweatshirt — or even long pants and socks. And then I finally go put on some warmer clothes and go “Oh, I feel all cozy now” and my cats look at me like I’m a complete idiot, which I am.

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Existential Dread — Malört Edition

By | January 2, 2025
So obviously tonight’s a Jeppson’s Malort kind of night (my team, the Georgia Bulldogs, having pooched it in the Sugar Bowl), and when I went to find the four minibottles remaining in my pack of six, I COULDN’T FIND THEM.
I was left with several alternatives, all worrisome or outright frightening:
  1. some thief had broken in and stolen only them (why???)
  2. they had evolved intelligence and were plotting against me from behind the wainscotting
  3. I had actually drunk them in a midnight sleepwalking binge of some kind and somehow not remembered in the morning (the aftertaste of gasoline and bitter grapefruit not being a sufficient clue?)
In any event, the knowledge that SOMEWHERE IN MY HOUSE four minibottles of Malört were lurking and I DIDN’T KNOW WHERE really bothered me.
But I finally found them lurking behind my bottle of Luxardo.
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Cutting-Edge Education

By | January 1, 2025

I am fifty-seven years old. I realize that I graduated high school FORTY YEARS AGO. I’m old, thankyouverymuch.

I don’t have children. I have, realistically, next to no idea what they teach kids in schools these days, nor how they go about teaching it. I assume computers and the Internet are involved. There are probably apps that the kids are required to download to their smartphones. I don’t even know if paper textbooks are still a thing.

When I was a kid, we still used old-fashioned paper textbooks, and given that I went to school in southwest Virginia, Blue Ridge Mountain country, there wasn’t exactly a huge emphasis placed on keeping them up to date and current. True, I went to school in Blacksburg, Virginia, home to Virginia Tech, and my father was a professor of nuclear physics, but that didn’t mean our schools were were leaps and bounds ahead of those in the surrounding, much more rural, counties. Tech had been a comparitively small school until the late 1960s (q.v.) and the community still wasn’t used to having all those PhDs wandering about. (True story: the physics curriculum at my high school was so terrible that some of the physics faculty from Virginia Tech came in to complain about the crap their children were being taught, to no avail.) So, long story short, they tended to keep using textbooks until the pages were flat-out falling out.

I was in middle school between 1978 and 1981 and in high school between 1981 and 1985: the Carter years and the first of Reagan’s two terms.

We had health textbooks that had been published during the Eisenhower administration which focused more on the importance of keeping a clean, All-American body than on any actual concepts of disease and prevention. There was a whole section on the importance of not popping zits because it could and often did lead to encephalitis — BRAIN FEVER!!!

Our earth science textbooks treated continental drift as dangerous pseudoscience and focused instead on the “geosyncline” theory of mountain formation. Mountains were formed as the Earth cooled and shrank, so the crust would crumple and form mountains. Of course!

Never mind that bathymetric evidence of ocean floor spreading and magnetic evidence showing historical alignment of plates had been pretty definitively provided in the mid-1960s.

Then there’s a history textbook we were issued in seventh grade. No kooky theory or irrelevant detail was too obscure to include.

This included the 1903 “Heartland” theory which held that the nation that controlled the area east of the Volga and north of the Himalayas (in other words, Russia) would inevitably come to dominate and rule the world. Why? Because Halford John Mackinder said so.

Who?

Exactly.

Its academic rigor was irrelevant, though; this was the era when Leonid Brezhnev and the Communist hordes were lurking just over the horizon and anything that could be done to build up the Red Menace as a serious threat, was.

My favorite part of that particular history textbook, though, was the picture from the top of this page: “Representation of the different Ways to Everlasting Life or Eternal Damnation”. Some rando named Gustav Sigismund Peters (“America’s first color printer”) threw it together circa 1830 in all its Grand Guignol awfulness. What it had to do with teaching us the history of comparative religion in America, I’ll never know. But it was in our textbook. (If you click the hyperlink immediately above, it takes you to a page where you can zoom in on various parts of the picture to get a really good look at it.)

To be fair, though, my textbooks from back in the day aren’t that different from what’s used in certain school systems in the South, where slavery is treated with kid gloves and slaves described as indentured laborers with self-esteem problems, and where it’s actually illegal to mention evolution in biology texts.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter how good or bad our textbooks were. Kids tended to get promoted regardless of their grades; I never did homework because of boredom and severe depression and I still got moved on each year. (On the other hand, my classmates who did do their homework wound up at Stanford, Brown, the University of Virginia, Duke, and so on. wound up at the University of Georgia, known at the time for academic scandals involving the football team and not much else.)

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