What not to name your beer...

Oh, my. Dogfish Head, a Delaware-based craft brewer, has come out with a new limited-edition pilsner. If you read their information on the brew, you’ll find they feel quite strongly that American pilsners made with adjunct grains (corn and rice instead of barley) are, for the most part, crap. I couldn’t agree more! Their idea of making a traditional pilsner and releasing it in the US is a fine one. So, they learned the style, brewed the beer, and all that was left was the name…

I’m sure they agonized over this – trying to find something that was an apt description of the fine brew they’d crafted. A celebration of the true pilsner style; something to really set them apart from the mass-produced imposters that they so disdain. And then, it hit them:



Yes, that’s right, Dogfish Head has named their new craft brew Golden Shower Imperial Pilsner.

Now, if you're anything like me, I know what you’re thinking...
“Best beer T-shirt ever!”. Alas, Dogfish Head refuses to let their creation be tarnished by something so crass as marketing:

We've watched what half-billion dollar marketing campaigns and million-dollar-a-minute ads have done for the Pilsner beer style in this country thus far and we're not impressed. We might be wrong, but, if spending stupid amounts of advertising dollars has diluted the Pilsner to its current anemic state, then we think our best hope to reconstitute the style is to spend zero dollars advertising our Golden Shower Imperial Pilsner. We won't buy an ad, make a t-shirt, a neon, a hat, or a key-chain and certainly not a blimp that promotes this beer.

Umm… yeah…

It’s heartbreaking, really. I was so looking forward to watching the Golden Shower blimp lazily drifting across the Boston skyline, making everyone beneath it extremely nervous. The neon signs that would forever be the pride of shady bars everywhere. And of course, the Golden Shower T-shirts for all my friends.

[sigh]

Oh well. I guess it’s just not meant to be.

Thanks to Myn for the link. If she wants a tacky beer t-shirt for her birthday, I suppose she’ll just have to settle for the current reigning champion - Polygamy Porter.

We've hit 1000...

Wow. At some point over the weekend, this blog had its 1000th visitor. That kind of snuck up on me. I was planning on offering some sort of prize to visitor #1000, but I guess that ship has sailed. Maybe I’ll do so for some arbitrary number in the 1000s instead.

I did an insane amount of work yesterday, doing the final cleanup on my substrate to work with on my trip to KC. The technique I’m doing in there requires huge amounts of DNA relative to the other experiments I do (in the neighborhood of 100 times as much), so it’s always been something of a scramble to produce enough to work with. This time though, I’m not down to the wire (my big push to finish stuff was yesterday, the rest of the week is just adding on where I can), so I’m able to be calm and look forward to the trip. I’m in very capable hands with the people I work with down there, so I’m pretty excited about the research aspect. Also, the BBQ (although I've found the beer there a little lacking). And one of these days I’m going to venture out to Cawker City, Kansas, and see the World’s Largest Ball of Twine. Because… well, that needs no justfication, really.

Rather than trying to be entertaining today, I’ll link to someone who is. Check out this Jon Swift’s brilliant satire on the protests over proposed immigration legislation. Almost as funny as the posts on the site are the comments from people who clearly don’t get that it’s satire. I realize it’s well written satire, but honestly people. Jon Swift. Name ring a bell? If not, please consider re-taking high school English. You um… missed something.

One more bonus to my trip – the time in airports and on planes will give me a rare chance to read really trashy fiction. Any suggestions?

Mmmm... Irony...

As some of you may be aware, conservative writer Ben Domenech resigned today from his less-than-weeklong stint as a blogger for the Washington Post after (multiple) allegations of plagiarism. He's been forced to address the issue, but as it happens, this isn't the first time Ben has felt compelled to discuss plagiarism. Here’s what he had to say about Jayson Blair in his personal blog back in 2003:

Jayson Blair sells his story, a fact that upsets me even more than Stephen Glass’s return through The Fabulist. Glass at least served a period of penance, like Marv Albert or something. Blair wants to go straight from getting shredded in the NYTimes to climbing the NYTimes bestseller list. While I’m not quite on the same level as Goldberg's righteous anger, I do feel that there should be no quarter given to Blair's vile lies. And I think that this whole affair finally signals that the New York Times deserves to be ignored as a source for legitimate news -- the Washington Post can replace it as the newspaper of record.

That’s great! Especially the bit about the Post. It's not the only time that he rails against plagiarists in his blog (look through here and here for examples). So you’d think he’d be remarkably contrite given the circumstances... Or not. Take a look at his statement about the his current situation over on Red State.

Weak. For those of you who aren't too inclined to click over to Red State, you can basically sum up his response by quoting Homer Simpson:

This is everyone’s fault but mine.

Good to see the culture of personal responsibility is alive and well in America...

UMKC Kangaroos, and gory wisdom tooth extraction pictures

It just occurred to me that the mascot for UMKC (where I will be traveling in a few weeks), is actually the Kangaroos, making the video I linked in the last post entirely appropriate. OK, well, maybe not entirely appropriate, but still... relevant? No? How about tangentially related?

For today's post, I thought I'd include something cheery for my roommate, who is having her wisdom teeth extracted tomorrow. I don't think she's entirely aware of what she's in for, but I'm still hoping she makes it through without too much misery. For her edification (as well as for those of you who are here looking for gory pictures), here's a link to the 32teethonline Oral Surgery page. Seriously, even their banner headline is revolting. Sweet.

In Cold Bleh - and something involving umm... boomerangs...

I’ve been trying for a while to come up with a blog post that might be worth reading, but I’m resigned to the fact that that isn’t going to happen, so I’ll just post something moderately offensive, and curl up on the couch to re-read In Cold Blood.

Given the thesis-related stress that I’ve been experiencing in the past few weeks (months… years…), it may seem a little odd that I’m taking the time to read something with no apparent connection to finishing my degree. As it happens though, I’m traveling to the Midwest in a couple of weeks to work with collaborators at the UMKC - a trip in which I’ll be staying in Kansas - so I consider the book vital background research into understanding the locals. Yeah. That’s it. What a great excuse!

While pondering my trip to Kansas (and trying not to think about the recent issues they’ve had with tornados), it occurred to me that I will be staying fairly close to Lawrence on the day of the NCAA championship. This prospect was (note: was) exciting, because Kansas basketball is usually pretty competitive, and on the off chance they managed to make it to the title game, I would have the wonderful opportunity to watch the Kansas fans watching the game. Sounds like a great party, and it's always entertaining to be around when a whole town loses its collective mind. But, alas, the Jayhawks couldn’t even be bothered to lead me on, and lost in the first round to Bradley. The freakin’ first round! To Bradley! What the hell is that? They call themselves a basketball team?

Now I have nothing to look forward to on my trip to Kansas, except maybe that whole part about working with wonderful collaborators and finishing up work vital to my thesis. Where’s the fun in that? I suppose now to hold out hopes of having any fun, I’ll have to switch my loyalties to (how the hell did they make the Sweet Sixteen?) Wichita State, although I suspect they have a considerably smaller Kansas-wide following. Oh well, when in Rome, right? Go umm… Shockers!

Shockers?

Anyway, since I clearly have nothing of value to say, I will at least make good on my promise to post something moderately offensive. The following is a link to something I found while wandering aimlessly in YouTube. Enjoy the video, I’m going to return to the Clutter family now.



***Disclaimer: Aunt Jo, you probably won’t find this funny, I wouldn’t even watch it if I were you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.***

Thesis nightmares, real and imagined...

Fueled partly by my stress from writing my thesis, and partly by reading the comments in this post at Michael Bérubé’s website, I had a whopper of a thesis defense dream last night. In it, I was at my thesis defense, which (of course) was taking place on the front lawn of the house I grew up in. My committee was all there, camped out in lawn chairs, as were several other hangers-on (family members, friends from different times in my life, fictional characters, that sort of thing). I was holding court in front of the plum tree, which somehow was an adequate backdrop to project powerpoint slides onto. The talk was going pretty well, but it was running a little long, so the chair of my committee recommended taking a quick break so that everyone could grab more coffee. And then... my entire committee used the opportunity to ditch me. They just snuck off and went home. I spent the rest of my dream trying to track them down, so I could force them to listen to the rest of my talk and sign my thesis, but to no avail. The whole time this was going on I was trying to decipher if the mass exodus meant that I automatically passed, or automatically failed. I still haven’t figured it out.

I’ve never had a dream like this before, so I’m going to blame all the commenters on Prof. Bérubé’s site, who described their nightmares about teaching classes where students just got up and left in the middle of class. Clearly I’m very suggestible right now. Also, the stress from trying to finish up is getting to me. It feels like I have a very finite amount of work left to do (which, I suppose, is true), and that every minute I spend doing something else is time that is added on to the end of my tenure in graduate school. Which is making it sort of difficult for me to relax, or even, y’know, sleep.

I’m trying very hard to pace myself and approach the whole thing rationally (I’m going to need to sleep between now and when I actually finish), but it’s proving to be a little difficult. The whole situation is made worse by the fact that writing is really hard while I’m in the lab, since everyone seems to gravitate toward me whenever they have a question about anything. I tried to fend people off with the following hastily made-up sign:



Care to guess how effective that was at getting people to leave me alone? Even people who wouldn’t normally talk to me started staring at me like I was a zoo exhibit. Standing in front of me smirking until I looked up at them. On the upside, I’ve gotten plenty of commiseration from people who have completed their degrees and know what it’s like. On the downside: I. CAN’T. GET. ANY. WRITING. DONE.

If any of you have any great suggestions for how to get people to leave me alone in the lab so I can work, I’d love to hear them. Please don’t suggest not showering for extended periods of time though. It’s MIT. I’m not sure anyone would even notice.

CITC Website update: My meta tags have significantly improved the site's ranking in Google for a lot of search terms. I'm probably not going to be able to make much more progress on this until we get rid of the ghastly frames that are currently being employed on the site. Unfortunately, I'm still having no luck with the Jake Kennedy search string (although my blog post on the topic now comes in at number 10 in the search – ha!). If anyone has an indexed website and is willing to help me out, I’d appreciate it. (If you’re willing to help, but have no idea what I’m talking about, e-mail me, and I’ll clue you in).

Salty Egg King Steams the Vegetable Sponge

Offered without comment, from rahoi.com by way of Pharyngula:

May I take your order?

Seriously. Click the link.

Because life isn't always just a bowl of cherries...

Anyone who is going to be in Boston towards the end of May, and wants to get a dose of culture (while supporting a good cause) should consider going to this:

2006 Christmas in the City Evening at Pops

If you’re out of town that day (Saturday, May 20th) or Gershwin just isn’t your thing, but you’d like to send an inner-city kid to see the Pops, there’s a ticket donation option too. Just specify when you place the order for the donated tickets that that's what (who) you want the donation to go to. Check out the site, or e-mail me for more information.

Also: CITC can always use more volunteers. Don't be shy!

Almost finished the season...

This afternoon I get to go through the agonizing ordeal of watching my team play the final game of the season without me. I’ve officially hung up my skates for the season; my shoulder had stopped improving, and playing was really starting to take its toll, so I decided to take several months off in order to get back to 100% before getting back in the game. It’s a little disappointing to have to quit with so little of the season left, but I am happy with how I played in my limited return to action (6-1-1, 92.9 save percentage, allowing an average of 1.34 goals a game). The range of motion and strength in my arm are really good - flexibility is back to what it was before surgery, and strength-wise, well, let’s just say that pre-surgery Marita would not want to meet present-day Marita in a dark alley.

So that’s all well and good, the only problem now is that my shoulder is still achy, and gets sore and tired really fast. I’m led to believe that this is a matter of inflammation, and that the whole resting (in terms of not playing sports) and continuing with strength exercises thing will get rid of the problem in time. I’m even in the process of getting weaned off of PT, which is a little scary (I feel more comfortable with adult supervision), but I expect to survive OK on my own.

That said, I’ve read through past posts, and realized that there’s a lot of the rotator cuff tear/surgery process that I never wrote about. While most of the people who wander through this blog are looking for “gory pictures”, there are a reasonable number who end up here while searching for information about shoulder surgery. So, I’ll try to oblige and gradually fill in as much information as I can. Part of what was so terrifying about the whole process for me was the dearth of (non-technical or non-“official”) resources that would tell me what to expect during the various procedures. So maybe I can help with that… a little.

Update (end of the 1st): Watching this is so difficult. I thought I was nervous when I played, but at least playing gives me something to focus on. I'm sitting here in the stands shaking, which is ridiculous, because it's not like this game is particularly meaningful. We don't have play-offs or anything. 0-0 game at the end of one, with some insanely good scoring chances for MIT. Let's hope we keep it up.

Update (end of the 2nd): I can breathe a little easier now, as we've started finding the cracks in the HBS goalie's game. Add to that the most aggressive penalty kill we've ever managed (where we outshot them 5-0), and we're in pretty good shape, although I wouldn't mind some insurance goals. Current score: MIT 2 - HBS 0. One more period to go...

Final Update: Phew. We kept up the pressure (for the most part) and netted two more goals (including the first-ever goal for rookie sensation Yuki Jung) to win it 4-0. Toughest game for me all season. I need a nap.

Wish they'd mark the visited states with blue...

But this is still kind of fun. I've been around more than I realized. I think the trick to looking good on this map is to visit the biggest states. You can wander all over New England, and on this map it looks less impressive than spending a day or two in Texas. Hmm... Anyway, here are the states I've visited (not counting airport stopovers):



create your own visited states map

In other news, FoMF (friend of Marita's family) Jed Lowrie is making a good showing at shortstop in Red Sox spring training; he just ripped a single against the Pirates to bring his spring batting average up to 0.333. We're big fans of Jed around here. I think he's starting the season with advanced-A Wilmington, but I'm hoping he makes it up to AA Portland fairly early on. I'd like lots of chances to see him play this summer, but making the trip to Delaware just wouldn't fill in that much more of the map.

New Arrival: Definitely One of Us

I have to hand it to my father – he’s been a grandfather for less than two weeks, and he’s already managed to get a picture of my new niece making an obscene gesture:



I suppose I should be thrilled to see that she’s able to express herself so clearly at such a young age (technically, since she was three weeks premature, she’s still only -1.5 weeks old). Although I probably shouldn't be surprised. Given that my father will have significant babysitting duties, I'm fairly certain she’ll be swearing prolifically by 18 months, belligerently questioning everything my brother tells her by age three, and will have her first school suspension within the first week of kindergarten. Hopefully my father learned his lesson with my generation and won't push her too hard though - it would probably be best if she could wait for her first bar fight until somewhere around age 12. Need to give her time to put on enough size to really throw those barstools around, you know?

I purchased a wide variety of obnoxiously loud baby toys and had them shipped back home for her to play with. Hope my brother fully appreciates the gesture...

Rebalancing the Internets: The Two (Billion) Jakes

As some of you are probably aware, in my very limited spare time I volunteer for a local non-profit called Christmas in the City. You really should check them out if you haven’t; it’s a wonderful organization that puts on a fantastic (and huge) holiday party for local homeless families, and has branched out into year-round work that includes things like Thanksgiving baskets for families who wouldn’t otherwise have them, educational programs in the shelters, and having teams of volunteers “adopt” individual families when they leave the shelters to help them find the resources they need to stay permanently um… not homeless. (What the hell is the opposite word to “homeless” anyway? “Homed”? “Homeful”? Grrr..)

Anyway, one of the great things about CITC (apart from what they actually do) is that it’s 100% volunteer – no one is getting paid to do anything, and everyone is there because they want to be. Makes for a great bunch of people (certainly better people than myself), and I really enjoy working with them. The downside to the all-volunteer thing is that since no one is getting paid for anything, they’re more than happy to share responsibilities. In fact, as I discovered, the fastest way to volunteer for anything in CITC is to complain that it hasn’t been done. So, when I foolishly groused that their website had not been updated in almost a year, I instantly became the new CITC webmaster.

I tried pointing out that my being at MIT does not mean that I know the first thing about computers, and that I actually had no idea what I was doing, but to no avail. So, my sorry HTML-challenged ass now has a non-bloggy website to be in charge of. No pressure – it’s just the holiday happiness of several thousand children at stake here! Ha! Also, it isn’t the easiest job - the site is sorely in need of some fixin’ up. It was probably pretty shiny ten years ago, but the times have changed, and it hasn’t caught up. A lot needs to be done. Fortunately, we’re several months away from their big event of the year, so I have time to straighten things out. Even more fortunately, my friend Dave (who actually knows his HTML ass from his JavaScript elbow) loves a good engineering challenge and is helping out (a lot). Eventually we'll sort the whole site out.

Among the things that I need to work on is search engine optimization, because right now we’re not scoring so well in the search page rankings. I realize that good meta tags can go a long way toward fixing that, but there are some other problems in the way as well. Such as: the unofficial chief spokesman for CITC is the co-founder (and also my PT), Jake Kennedy. If there’s a radio or newspaper interview, or someone going to speak to a civic group about the organization, it’s probably Jake. That’s fine – he’s incredibly good at it, and has a combination of earnestness and enthusiasm that’s really effective. He’s just fantastic at making people want to get involved. The only problem is that a lot of people have an easy time remembering Jake, but don’t necessarily remember the name of the charity. I figured this out when I volunteered to answer phones for CITC during the holiday rush last year – a lot of people calling in to donate or “sponsor” a child’s present said they’d heard Jake on the radio or read about him in the paper, but didn’t really seem to know who they were calling outside of that.

So, no problem, right? I just need to make sure that if people decide to search for “Jake Kennedy” online, they have a snowball’s chance in hell of finding the CITC site. Right… Unfortunately, it’s not such an uncommon name, and there are Jake Kennedys wandering all over the place doing all sorts of internet-worthy things. You have to get to page 10 of a current Google search before you even get a hit for the Kennedy Brothers PT office. A little frustrating, but I’m not going to begrudge Jake Kennedy the Cultural Studies Professor, Jake Kennedy the Up-and-Coming Horror Film Director or Jake Kennedy the Canadian Diamond Expert their places in the sun. I’m a little more concerned though, about getting (choosing… words… carefully…) destroyed in the rankings by Jake Kennedy, star of such stirring family films as “College Boy Physicals 3”, and “Older Men with Younger Guys”. Call me paranoid, but I don’t think it’s going to help our cause if people have to sort through several pages of pr0n titles before they get to a listing for our site. Ack.

I guess what I’m getting to is that our Jake Kennedy could use a little boost. This Jake Kennedy (in the Boston Globe), this Jake Kennedy (in the LA Times), this Jake Kennedy (helping the Run for Research team train for the marathon) and this Jake Kennedy (PT bio) are all our guy, and are all good sites. Most importantly though, this Jake Kennedy link could use a serious nudge in the rankings. Anyone care to help?


PS -I'm not really thrilled with the web hosting we have for the CITC site and would like to switch, so if anyone knows of a kind-hearted web hosting service that wants to help a worthy non-profit out (or alternatively, if we end up having to pay for it, at least one that doesn't suck), please let me know.