The Great (Environmentally Conscious) Elf Rescue!

A couple nights ago, while getting my daughter ready for bed, she asked me to make up a story for her.

It’s been a long time since I made up a story on the spot, but seeing as I was in a Christmas kind of mood, I gave it a shot.  I’m sorry you can’t experience the original, illustrated as it was with a nifty glowing pictures thanks to a glow-in-the-dark light-writing board.  But you should still get the gist of it, complete with the requisite pseudo-leftist pro-environmental cautionary propaganda.

Santa Claus and the North Pole

Have you ever wondered why Santa lives at the North Pole?

He didn’t always, you know.  Years ago, before he was Santa, when he was young Nicolas, he lived on a tropical island, where he sat in the sun and drank lemonade.

This doesn’t mean Nick was a lazy young man.  No, he worked hard, building himself a tree house out of palm trees and coconuts, and in his spare time, he liked carving animals out of little pieces of driftwood.  His favorite animal to carve was a wooden duck.

He lived his tropical life for many years, until one day, when he was sitting in his usual spot on the beach, he felt water touching his toes.  He looked toward the ocean, and saw that the water was much higher today than it had ever been before.

How odd, he thought.  And he moved a little further up the beach.  An hour later, the waves were touching his toes again,

The ocean water was MUCH higher now.  Nick decided he’d had enough sitting on the beach and went back to his tree house.  He ate a coconut dinner and went to bed.

In the morning, he couldn’t get out of his tree house.  The ocean had flooded the whole island, and only the trees were still above the waves.  And the ocean was steadily getting higher!

He climbed to the top of the tree house and looked out at the island that was now gone under the ocean waves.

His island was sinking!

Nick called for help, knowing it was no use, knowing he was the only person on his island, but not knowing what else to do.  Suddenly, his cries were drowned out by the sound of a helicopter.  It was painted red and white and circled above his tree.  A rope ladder dropped down and Nick climbed up.  Inside the helicopter, was he met by two people, both with long gray beards and pointy ears, but both no bigger than a five-year-old child.

“I’m Clarence,” said Clarence.  “And this is Moe.  You’re lucky we were nearby.”  The only way Nick could tell the difference between the two elves was by their hats.  Clarence had a red and green hat, while Moe had a green and red hat.  Nick admitted to himself that was a poor way to tell them apart, but then Moe gave him a glass of lemonade, and he relaxed a little.

As the helicopter sped over the ocean, Nick asked the elves what was going on.

“The oceans are rising,” Clarence explained.  “It’s the children.  Right around this time of year, every year, all the children in the world get so sad, and they start crying, and their tears run into the rivers, which run into the oceans, and the oceans keep getting higher.  Your island was the lowest island we could find, which is lucky for you, because we were keeping an eye on it to see when it would finally flood.”

“If we can’t get the children to stop crying,” added Moe, “soon, the oceans will flood everything!”

That didn’t sound good to Nick.

“Where are we going?” Nick asked.

“We have to find someplace that won’t flood,” said Clarence.

“And figure out how to stop the children from crying,” added Moe.

“Hmm…” said Nick. 

They say that some people are born with great ideas, and that some people have an idea that becomes great.  And some people find themselves flying in a helicopter with elves while drinking lemonade and suddenly realize, Hey!  Ice floats!

“Take me to the North Pole!” Nick shouted.

At the North Pole, Nick sent Clarence off to find as many other elves as he could.  They’d need a lot of help.  And he asked Moe to start building the biggest sleigh ever built.  Meanwhile, Nick started carving ducks, hundreds of thousands of wooden ducks.

With the help of all the elves Clarence could find, they finished enough ducks for every single child in the world, and loaded them onto the sleigh, which was the biggest anyone has ever seen.  Nick checked the wind, checked the weather forecast, thanked the elves for all their help, hopped into the sleigh, and was ready to go!

Only one problem: the sleigh didn’t move.

Nick looked at Clarence.  Clarence looked at Moe.  Moe noticed that his shoelaces were untied.

After tying his shoes, Moe saw what was wrong.  The sleigh was missing reindeer!  So Moe grabbed eight reindeer that were grazing in the woods nearby and hitched them to the sleigh.  Nick snapped the reigns, and the reindeer pulled and pulled, but the sleigh still wouldn’t budge.

So Moe unhitched the eight regular reindeer, and hitched up eight jet-powered, laser-guided high-velocity reindeer in their place.  Nick gave the reigns that slightest wiggle, and they were airborne!

All through Christmas night they flew, landing on rooftops, dropping wooden toy ducks down chimneys, until Christmas dawn spread over the world.  And because children love wooden toy ducks, all the children in the world stopped crying.  And because all the children suddenly knew that one gift, however small, can mean that someone loves them very much, the oceans receded, and Nick’s island rose out of the ocean again. 

Now, years later, Nick has a beard just like his elves, and the whole world knows him as Santa (which means "Wooden Duck Maker" in elvish), but on a summer evening, when Christmas is still many months away, you might still catch him far from his workshop (which he kept at the North Pole, just in case anyone start crying again), lying on the beach with his glass of lemonade.

And that’s the true story.

Sort of.

 

If I Ran the World...

Well, It's been a long month, but at least the election is done and behind us. 

As you know, (unless you watch Fox News) President Obama won 4 more years.  Some months ago, this blog endorsed the President for re-election, based primarily on his being a fellow Homebrew Dad.

And he won.

So I think I’ll take the credit for that.

But what about the beer?         

The White House beer, I must say, is very good.  Not overly sweet, like many other honey ales I’ve tried, and not overly bitter, like too many homebrews made by homebrewers who think cranking the IBUs to 100 is an original idea.  Sweet, but balanced, surprisingly conservative while still clearly liberal in its alcohol content.  On the whole, delicious.

And as I was quaffing one of these delectable Election Day brews, it suddenly occurred to me how this might be the key to making the world a truly better place.  We spent a lot of time during the election talking about how things were, and how things are, but when it came to making things better, all we got from anyone were vague promises.

So here, in no particular order, are the 5 things I propose (under the influence of homebrew) for solving all our problems.  And the nice things is, none of these will cost much of anything, and will probably save us money in the long run.

Everyone Makes Homebrew

Who didn’t see that one coming?

Ok, so I’m biased, but I really think homebrewing will help solve a lot of our problems, and there are many really good reasons to try it.  For instance…

It will save you money.                

Seriously.  The ingredients for making a basic blonde (pale) ale, or pale lager, will run me about $30, and that’s not even a very good deal.  You can get the stuff cheaper if you try.  One batch makes 5 gallons, which works out to about 48 12 oz bottles, or 8 six packs.  Eight six packs for $30, or about $3.75 per six pack, for good beer.  Find me a better price anywhere.

And if you’re worried about taking jobs away from one of the few industries that still make things in this country, consider this: the best thing that has happened to the beer industry in the last half decade is the rise of homebrewers.  Homebrewing has led to microbrews, craft brews, and a resurgence of forgotten (in this country, anyway) styles like Belgian white, or Irish red.

Don’t like beer?  Make wine.

Don’t drink?  Make cheese, make vinegar, make something! 

We as a society are increasingly reliant on the supermarket and industrial processed food.  I’m not saying everyone should go back to owning a farm and returning to a subsistence economy, but seriously, understand what goes into our food, and try making some stuff from scratch.  You’ll be surprised how easy it is, and how good it turns out!  And it might change the way you think about food.

Eliminate Political Parties

As things stand right now, everyone in this country is identified either as a Democrat or a Republican (or Libertarian, Tea Partier, Communist, and there might be a couple people up in Maine who still go by Bull Moose, I’m not sure).  The point is, right now, that party defines who you are, with Democrats favoring high taxes, and Republicans favoring deregulation of everything, and Tea Partiers favoring white people.  Our representatives go to work, based on party ideals, and only the party with a majority can get anything done.

But what if you want lower taxes and a reduction in government spending, and also favor gay marriage, a woman’s right to choose, and an expansion of Medicaid?  Are you a conservative Democrat?  A liberal Republican?  A Republocrat?

The various party platforms do not and cannot represent every point of view of every American perfectly.  We’re slightly more complex than that.  And increasingly, our elected representatives are discouraged from having their own opinions and voting according to what they believe, because if they do they will be punished by the party machinery. 

Our political system is brilliant at doing exactly what it was designed to do.  It takes into account that we will have important and complicated issues that face us, we have representatives with radically different ideas on how to solve these problems, and we have a process by which competing ideas can be debated, and we have regular elections so if people don’t like the outcome, they can elect new representatives.

This system works, when we let it.

The problem lies in the need to put party needs above the needs of the country, or the state, or the electorate.  People can, and do, have political positions, and they should be elected according to that, but once they are elected, those politicians need to be able to think for themselves in putting forward ideas and considering the ideas put forward by others.  Instead, the parties themselves now stand directly in the way of compromise and rational debate. 

They need to go away. 

Our politicians need to stand up to the powerful partisan machinery, and the voters need to reward the politicians that do.

And please, my fellow voters, call bullshit on the next partisan politician who makes any reference to the “original intention of our founding fathers” or any such nonsense.  Or founders didn’t intend anything, except that people get to vote for their leaders (a radical idea, at the time), and that our nation would occasionally enjoy a peaceful transfer of power from one group of leaders to another (even more radical, at that time), and somehow, even when we disagreed, we’d all find a way to live together without anyone threatening to leave the country if they lost like some whiny kid being forced to share his toys (still a radical idea).

 

And speaking of irrational partisan bickering...

 Free Healthcare

It’s not in the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution, but only because medical coverage in the 18^th century was mostly delivered in the form of leeches.  But today, with the current advances in medical treatment, with our scientific understanding of health and nutrition and today’s much longer life expectancy, there is no excuse.

Give healthcare to everyone.  Full care for children and elderly; basic, routine care for everyone else.

Didn’t I say this wouldn’t cost us anything?

It wouldn’t.  The government has the money, most of these programs are already in place in one form or another, either at the federal or state level.  And you and I, as private citizens and taxpayers, already pay way more for healthcare than we would under a single-payer government-run system.  Money is not the issue.  Well, money is the issue, but only the money in the insurance industry.  And that's a lot of money we're spending on this stuff, which buys really good lawyers and lobbyists.

But really, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

At least two of those require healthcare.

 Pay People More (Certain People, Anyway)

We are a people who react to incentives.

And there’s no better incentive than money.

Which is why so many smart people spend their lives buying and selling imaginary things like stocks or derivatives or mutual funds or inverse fault derivative bargains (I just made that last one up, but by next year, you’re 401(k) be heavily invested in them), bringing home ridiculous amounts of money to spend on private schools or influencing politicians.

People aren’t attracted to these jobs because they like playing with imaginary things.  They’re attracted by the money.  Which is good, for our overall economy (I want smart people in charge of inflation, interest rates, and economic growth), but what about other just as essential jobs.

It turns out, some of the most important jobs necessary for the future of our country don’t pay very well.  And we should change that.

Start with paying teachers more.  Our schools are, after all, literally determining the course of the future of this country (hint: it’s the kids).  So naturally, we devalue the importance of teachers to the point that the only people who take that job either a) really, really want to teach, even if it means barely making ends meet for most of the rest of their life, only to retire and need to take on a new job because their pension isn’t enough to live on, or b) they want summers off, and don’t really care about anything.

I think most teachers fall into the (a) category, but I’ve met a few from (b). 

But what if young people said to themselves, “I’m smart, I got good grades, I really want to make a boat-load of money.   I could pursue law, maybe get an MBA, or maybe I could become an eight-grade math teacher.”

There are a lot of problems with our educational system, but instead of arguing about class size, or standardized testing (for which there are rational arguments on both sides, and the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle), start with paying teachers what they deserve.  Treat them like rock stars, and while you’re at it, stop pretending rock stars are "role models."  I’d rather my daughter would want to grow up to be like her pre-school teacher than Lady Gaga.

Paying more money to teachers would also attract better teachers, and our students would come out of school with better educations, resulting in more innovations, better leadership all over the place, and a booming economy.

Now, you say, this MUST cost us more money!

That depends (he says in a classic Clintonian evasion).

Are we spending, or are we investing?  Right now, we keep talking about spending money on school, when really, we need to talk about investing in our future (hint: it’s still the kids!).

Of course, no politician would dare spend that much more on education when rich special interests line their pockets with “gifts” and “campaign contributions.”  So before we pay teachers more, first we need to pay another profession more:

Politicians.

And let the hate mail begin!

No, really, hear me out!  Right now, politicians make relatively little salary for what they do.  If you want to be a politician and make a decent living you either need to be a) independently wealthy, or b) totally corrupt.  Or c) both.

Are these really the people we want deciding the fate of this country?  Where are the scientists, the teachers, the laborers, the social workers, the nobel laureates?  They either can’t afford it, or can’t be bothered with such a hopelessly corrupt system.

So, same as with teachers, pay more, and attract a better quality of politician.

There are many good politicians (mostly rich), and many smart politicians (mostly corrupt), but many, many who are neither (both).  We can vote any of these guys out and put in someone who is smart and honest, but they’d have to run for office first, and no one that smart and that honest has any incentive to run.  And that needs to change.

We can take the corrupting influence of money away, just by paying them more.  And every single successful corporation in the world knows that this works.

Think it will cost us money?

I think smart politicians will be a lot more efficient at spend our tax money than most of the turkeys in charge of that now.

(On a personal note, I’d really like to say social workers and retail managers should also be paid more, but I’ll save that for another time.)

And finally,

Go To Mars

I know, this is already on the table.  And I love it.  Space exploration programs produce more return on investment in terms of technological development than just about any other program out there.  These programs, though expensive, pay for themselves.  

Think NASA is a giant waste of taxpayer money?  Check out this site and see what NASA research and development has contributed to the world.  (It doesn't seem too impressive, just one thing...well, refresh the page.)

Which is why we need to go to Mars.

Now, ask any theoretical physicist, engineer, or behavorial psychologist what it will take to get to Mars, and you’ll get three good answers why it’s currently  impossible.  Put them together in a locked room with enough Mountain Dew and pizza, and all those problems will be solved long before the oxygen runs out, and those answers will lead to new technologies with practical applications right here on Earth, which will in turn lead to new industries, new private companies, new manufacturing jobs, and entire new economic models.

Plus, it would be awesome.

Which is why I should run the world.  

One Last Ghost Story: The Burning of the Palatine

Well, last night was Halloween, and what a great Halloween it was!  Weather turned out to be good, my neighborhood has electricity, and we got gobs and gobs of candy!

We also took part in our town’s latest and not-so-greatest idea for creating a “safe” trick-or-treating environment: truck-or-treat.

Have you heard of this?  Maybe I’m the last to know.

In our case, people gather their cars on the town common, open their trunks, and hand out candy to parades of little kids walking by.  Last year, when half the town was still without power and electrical lines and tree branches still hung precariously on many streets, trunk-or-treating saved Halloween.  This year, it was somewhat less necessary.  And it kind of gives me the willies.

The idea seems like a good one:  gather the kids in one place and create a safe trick-or-treating environment.  Only think about the behavior this encourages:  walking up to a stranger’s car because of the promise of candy in the truck.  That’s just an abduction waiting to happen.

On the other hand...

But while that’s all behind us, there’s still time for one last ghost story:

This one, like my last one, comes out of Rhode Island.  I grew up close to the ocean, and from some of the Rhode Island beaches where I would build sand castles and look for shells and sea glass, I could look out on the vastness of the blue-gray waters, and the unimaginable secrets held in its depths.

Rhode Island has not one, but many islands, almost all of which are found within Narragansett Bay.  But a little ways out into the Atlantic Ocean lies the tiny island of Block Island, all by itself.  As you can imagine, the people on Block Island make their living largely off the ocean, and have for centuries, one way or the other.

Back in the 18^th century, sailing along the waters off southern New England was a dangerous affair.  Between storms and rocks, many ships met their end, including many that ended up run aground on the shores of Block Island.  In those cases, there were residents of the island who would come out and ransack the ship, scavenging anything they could get their hands on.

Supposedly, some even hung lanterns or built signal fires near the most dangerous rocks, hoping to attract ship to be wrecked on the rocks.  And some say that is exactly what happened to the Princess Augusta in 1738.

The Princess Augusta was carrying a load of immigrants, nothing of value at all, but it was caught in a storm of Long Island.  The legends are unclear if the ship struck the rocks of Block Island by accident, or if they were lured onto the rocks by wreckers, but wreck it did.

The wreckers who made it to the ship found nothing of value, but helped all the passengers onto shore.  All, that is, except for one woman, sometimes described as a “mad woman,” who refused to leave.  The ship was set ablaze, at which point the rising tide and winds pushed the Princess Augusta back off the rocks.  The ship drifted off to the edge of the horizon, blazing like a Viking funeral, and all the while, the people ashore could hear the mad woman’s screams.

The following year, on the anniversary of the wreck, awestruck islanders watched as the Princess Augusta appeared again off shore, still engulfed in flames, and the mad woman’s screams once again filled their ears, before drifting once again beyond the horizon.

This horrifying story became even more legendary when the poet John Greenleaf Whittier used it as the inspiration for his poem, “Wreck of the Palatine.”

And to this day, residents of Block Island still say that one night a year, usually the night of a storm, near the anniversary of wreck back in 1738, you can still see the light of the burning ship on the horizon, now known as the “Palatine Light.”

And if the wind is blowing just the right way, the mad woman’s screams can still be heard.

A Hometown Ghost Story

As I mentioned before, I love everything about Halloween, especially the spooky ghost stories that pop up again and again this time of year.  So grab a bottle of pumpkin beer, settle in, and enjoy!

Ok, you may have noticed that my last ghost story was low on actual ghosts.  Fair enough, but do you know how hard it is to find real, totally true ghosts stories?  If there were more of them, people wouldn’t always be telling their kids, “There’s no such thing as ghosts.” 

Hogwash, I say, and to prove it, this next story features a ghost who testifies in her own murder trial! For this story, we must go all the way to my own hometown of Portsmouth, Rhode Island.

This story takes place in the late 1600s, while Rhode Island was thriving British colony.  (Yeah, I said, “thriving colony,” not “den of heretics and criminals,” or “tiny, insignificant backwater.”  You got a problem with that?)  At the time, Portsmouth was a rural farming community, right close to the wealthy trading port of Newport, meaning you has some very rich families living there.  One of them was the Cornell family, led by the matriarch Rebecca Cornell.

Note to Google Images:  Different Cornell.

In her later years, she lived in her large (relatively speaking) house with her son and his wife.  One night, Rebecca was sitting by the fire, wrapped in a blanket to keep warm.  She had just fallen asleep when, supposedly, embers from the fire drifted out of the hearth and landed on her blanket.

Soon, her blanket, and consequently Rebecca herself, was engulfed in flames.  Before her son could respond to her screams for help and put out the fire, Rebecca was dead.  She was buried, and her son inherited the house and most of her estate.

Not too spooky, yet (except that bit about burning to death), but it seems Rebecca had a brother who lived in Newport, and shortly after her death, she came to visit her brother.

The ghost of Rebecca Cornell appeared to her brother, and told him that she had been murdered.  And not just murdered, but shot in the chest by her own son!

Then, according to the brother, she showed him the bullet wound on her chest.

This was a more superstitious time, so when Rebecca’s brother brought this “evidence” to the authorities, they did not laugh and throw him in the drunk tank, like they probably would today.  Instead, they exhumed the body, and found the bullet wound, right where the ghost had said it would be.

Rebecca’s son was arrested, tried, and execute for her murder.  He was supposedly buried not in the family plot with his mother, but ten feet away from the family house in an unmarked grave.

The house is still there, though it has been converted into a restaurant.  The whereabouts of Rebecca’s grave and her son’s grave are unknown.

Not pictured: the dead body buried under the driveway.

So, to sum up, a woman is killed by her own son, and he is arrested and execute for the crime, based solely on the testimony on her ghost.  This is the only case in the history of American law where a ghost has been admitted as evidence in a murder trial.  That means the next time people tell you ghosts aren’t real, tell them that even if ghosts aren’t real, they do have real legal standing!  Take that, Mythbusters!

Funny corollary: Thomas (Rebecca’s son) had a wife who was pregnant at the time of his execution.  She eventually moved to Fall River, where her daughter, Innocence Cornell, lived out her life, and whose descendants eventually married into the Borden family.  In other words, Lizzie Borden is a directly descendant of Rebecca Cornell.

We're not even trying, anymore.

Be back soon with more ghost stories!

Happy Halloween!

Time to get a little spoooooky

Well, it’s almost Halloween, which, as I’ve said before, is one of my favorite times of year. 

Why?

 The candy.  Obviously.

And as a close second, the ghost stories.

While I start getting the house ready with puffy paper ghosts and spiders and jack-o-lanterns, I thought I might pass a few down, nothing gruesome, just a little spine-tingling stories of the eerie and unexplained.  And all, hand-to-God, true.

So tuck the kids into bed, grab a homebrew, and enjoy!

Isn't it spoooooky?

Today, I thought, given the upcoming election, I might start with one about a former resident of the White House.

I know there is a legend about Lincoln’s ghost haunting the White House, but I’ve never seen it.  Ask Barack.  I’ll stick with the facts.  When Lincoln was alive, he was keenly aware of having some peculiar dreams, dreams he thought were trying to send him a message.

One such dream occurred in the early days of April, 1865.  In the dream, Lincoln found himself in the White House, but the house was dark, and quiet, except for a muffled sobbing.  He searched the house until he came to the room from which the sobbing emanated.  Inside, he found a coffin guarded by two soldiers, and a group of women in the corner, dressed in black.  He asked one of the soldiers, “Who is dead in the White House?”

The soldier responded, “Don’t you know?  It is the President.  He was killed by an assassin.”

Lincoln awoke, then, and was unable to sleep more that night.  About a week later, he took his seat in Ford’s Theater, and his place in history.

Hogwash, you say?  An invented story added to the memory of a fallen president?  Superstitious nonsense?  Perhaps, however…

Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, served as General Grant’s aid during the Civil War, and distinguished himself as a smart and capable young man.  He went on to become Secretary of War under President James Garfield.  One night, after a cabinet meeting, Garfield asked Robert Lincoln about the story of his father’s dream, and Robert told it, just as I have.

The next day, while walking to catch a train to meet his wife, who was recovering from a grave illness, Garfield was shot in the back and soon after died.

I don’t know if Robert Lincoln thought this was a strange coincidence, though he was undoubtedly shaken by all the violence his life had so far seen.  Certainly, it was an eerie story to tell about being close to two fallen Presidents.

I have no proof that he told both these stories to some traveling companion while visiting the Pan-American Expedition in New York in 1901, on the same day that President McKinley was shot, while also visiting the fair.  But I like to think that’s what happened.

Because that would tie Lincoln’s prophetic dream to the deaths of three Presidents!

The moral of the story?                                                                                     

If you ever run into any of Lincoln’s descendants, don’t ask them about their dreams!

What’s your favorite tale of haunted presidents?

More true tales of the unexplained, coming soon!

Arguing With My Republican Brother-in-Law

I suspect we all have one.  That one brother-in-law who always starts in on the political arguments.

It’s not that he’s a Republican.  That’s not the real cause of the arguments.  I have other friends who are politically conservative and Republican, and I find I can have thoughtful, balanced, informative conversations with them, as well as tell funny jokes and talk about our kids.

My brother-in-law, on the other hand, just badgers me with neo-conservative rhetoric, presumably not because he thinks he’ll change my mind, but because…well, that’s just the thing, I don’t know.  I don’t know why he takes so much pleasure in it, but he does.

It doesn’t help that he lives in Texas.                                                             

Texas.  Massachusetts.  You can pretty much tell how all these conversations go.



We're just like JFK and LBJ, except... No, we're not.
I'm sorry, that analogy fell apart before it even got started.

And he called just the other night.  In fairness, we called him to try and sell him magazines.  Because, of course, my daughter’s education is being funded by magazine sales.  Don’t get me started.

Anyway, being cheap, he bought nothing.  And then, the arguments began.  I don’t know if I can truly transmit the silliness of his arguments, or the sarcasm of my responses, but I will try, because I feel it sums up the insane rhetoric of this campaign season.  To wit:

Him: “This country needs someone to get us out of this recession.”

Me: “We’re not in a recession.”

Him: “Bill Clinton says we’re in a recession.”

Me: “Are you really going to quote Bill Clinton to me?”

Him: “Bill Clinton says we’re in a recession.”

Me: “Recessions have a clear definition.  We’re not in a recession.  President Obama already go us out.”

Miss the part where he completely avoided the empirical reality of what is or is not a recession?

Or, my personal favorite:

Him: “But Obama shouldn’t force insurance on everyone.  I think states should have the right to make up their own minds on what their citizens can do.”

Me: “Right, which is why they need to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and the Federal government must allow same-sex marriage if a state decides it’s ok.”

Him: “Well, if a state wants to permit same-sex marriage, other states shouldn’t be forced to accept it.”

Me: “Of course they should!  That’s a perfect use of the Commerce Clause!  People can’t have a different legal status in two different states!”

Him: “But the Defense of Marriage Act was signed by Bill Clinton.”

Me: “Leave Bill Clinton out of this!”

Ok, I may have made that last bit up, but it was there in spirit, if not in words.

In the end, he tried to sum up the conversation with the old standby, “I guess we have to agree to disagree.”

No!  I do not agree with that!  We are not just disagreeing.  One of us is dealing with reality, and the other is living in a word of rhetoric and spin, totally devoid of facts and practicality.

Unfortunately, on one point, he is quite right.  “I guess it doesn’t really matter, since you live in Massachusetts, and I live in Texas.”

Damn it, he’s right.  Our two votes totally don’t count, since those two states are pretty well predetermined to fall one Democrat and one Republican.  So why bother?  And why do we have such a ludicrous electoral system that benefits a handful of states while totally writing off the rest?

Answer:  Because our founding fathers didn’t trust the regular voter to make such an important decision as who will be president.  Because they believed that our country should be run by elite, intelligent people, capable of having dispassionate debate about important issues, instead of blindly following the “will of the people.” 

But since no one is interested in reasoned argument or debating the facts, we’re left with a country in which one half of the population will never be able to change the mind of the other half of the population and we’re all left talking to ourselves.  And elections are decided on voter turn-out in two, maybe three, states.  The rest of us could just as easily write-in Mickey Mouse for president and it won’t make any difference.

(Digression: DON’T write in Mickey Mouse.  That’s just throwing your vote away.  Write in “Dave Reed” instead.  A vote for me is a vote for beer!)

So, if our votes don’t really matter, what are we arguing about?  Why bother?  Well, I argue with him because I believe in the responsibility that every person has toward every other living person on this planet, in society taking care of those who are unable, for one reason or another, to take care of themselves, and in defending basic human rights and equality.  And since becoming a dad, I’m more convinced than ever that we must all work together somehow to make this world a better place for the next generation.

And my brother-in-law?  I’m pretty sure he just likes to piss me off.

Please.  Guy’s not even from Texas.  He’s from Connecticut.  That makes him exactly as much Texan as the FIRST President Bush.  And Joe Lieberman.  Just sayin’.

Where'd all the Joe-mentum go?

Science Is Awesome!

I’m a little late coming to write this, mostly because I’ve been on vacation.  And to make matters worse, our hotel room didn’t have free wifi.  Really?  No free wifi?  Because your guests have no interest in the internet?  Even my dogs are equipped with free wifi, and they only use it to google “poodle” over and over again.

Anyway, it was while in our hotel room one Monday morning that I heard the latest news on the Mars Curiosity rover.  (It had landed just after midnight, while I was asleep.  I couldn’t manage to stay up for the Olympics, either.  I’m getting old.)

I looked at my daughter and said, “Do you know what happened while you were asleep?”

“What, Daddy?”

“While we were asleep, some people landed a car on Mars.”

"It's the red one.  No, the other red one.  Maybe we should stop and ask for directions."

 

I could tell immediately that she understood what this meant.

“Whoa,” she said.  “Does Mommy know?”

She thinks planets are pretty cool.

I like to think she gets that from me.  I’ve always been a sucker for space exploration.  I was born a decade too late for the moon landing, but I remember watching the first shuttle launch.  I even remember a family vacation to Florida where I watched a shuttle launch in person, from the parking lot of an IHOP.

And yes, I admit, sometimes science can seem boring.  Did you need someone to explain the Higgs Boson particle after the Large Hadron Collider announced they might (or might not) have discovered it? 

Did you manage to not fall asleep? 

The Higgs Boson particle is really important, and its discovery will change our understanding of the entire universe, but explaining WHAT it is and WHY it’s important is frankly dull to anyone without a PhD in quantum physics.

That’s the sad truth of a lot of science.  Very cool, if you understand it; very boring, if you don’t.  It reminds me of Harrison Ford at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade explaining that most archeology is done in the library.

Bo-ring!

But every once in a while, science puts on its fedora, and sets off on a badass adventure of exploration and discovery that leaves all of us mere humans totally awe-struck.

And this time, they apparently did it with Batman.

That’s the only reasonable explanation for the bizarre method they came up with for landing the rover. 

Heat shield?  Standard issue. 

Giant parachute? Cool. 

Rocket powered sky crane?  Batman.  Totally Batman.

This is a big comeback for the space program, from retiring the shuttle fleet last year and the announcement that the next manned flight program would be cancelled.  That seemed like an end to NASA doing really cool stuff in the name of science, at least for awhile, and I was disappointed by the decision.  But then, it seemed that NASA’s gamble paid off, as private companies started competing to build rockets for the mostly mundane tasts of sending cargo and, hopefully, in the future, people, up to the International Space Station. 

That left NASA free to do other stuff, like building rocket-powered sky cranes!

By the way, that incredible feat of physics serves as the best answer ever whenever some child looks at the chalkboard during math class and says, “Why do I need to know this?”

Because when Apple launches its iRover, all that trigonometry is going to come in really handy.

Trigonmetry, calculus, quantum mechanics, relativity, all subjects sure to make the average person’s eye lids grow suddenly heavy, all matter because hundreds of years ago, Galileo decided to point his telescope up at the moon, at a time when no one really understood what the moon even really was.  Galileo knew that curiosity was the beginning of discovery, and tireless observation, experimentation, and relating solid facts without personal bias could reveal the truth of the universe.  

And he was tried by the Inquisition for doing it, and forced to never speak of his discoveries again.

It’s sometimes easy to think we haven’t come that far from Galileo, that science is still butting heads with religion.  It's easy to hang our heads in a long collective sigh and wonder if the human race will ever grow up.  But science and religion are two entirely separate things, and only one of them involves rocket-powered sky cranes.  (Unless the Pope is planning to upgrade the pope-mobile...)

As for me, I look forward to taking my daughter outside on a summer night, and turn her head upwards, to the stars.  And maybe we’ll even see a shooting star.  I assume her reaction will be something along the lines of, “Whoa.”  If not, maybe I’m not raising her right after all.  Because if a shooting star doesn’t elicit some amount of wonder, I’m not sure anything will.  And wonder excites imagination, and imagination inspires the future.

"Dad, that's just a flying unicorn, looking for a rainbow.  I've seen that, like, a hundred times..."

 

Maybe my daughter  will grow up to be a scientist, or maybe she won’t.  Whatever she grows up to be, I just hope she’ll live in a world where science will, once in awhile, put on its fedora and leave all of us awestruck, just like it did two Sunday’s ago.

And hopefully, it will do it with a rocket-powered sky crane.  Because that was awesome.

Sexy and I know it

I recently read an article on how sexy stay-at-home dads are.

And he’s right, we are sexy.

But I found myself at odds with some of the points in the article.

(Before I start, I really shouldn’t identify myself as a stay-at-home dad.  My wife and I tag-team parent.  We both work 40 hours a week, bring home a steady income, miss family events for work, and all that stuff, but just do so on opposite schedules.  It so happens that my job involves lots of nights and weekends, so when we talk about stay-at-home moms and stay-at-home dads, we’re talking pretty strictly about moms and dads who are home during traditional working hours, between 9 and 5, and that, more often than not, is when you’ll find me with my daughter.  I don’t consider myself the primary caregiver, because I don’t think of either of us as primary.  We raise her together.  But for the purposes of this post, I identify with many of the qualities cited in the stay-at-home dad.  Like sexy.  Especially sexy.)

And the article gets some things right, like that images and ideas of masculinity are rapidly changing.  Going to the gym, getting those perfect abs, having the coolest clothes, the nicest car, the biggest wallet, it might be that guys have miscalculated what in fact “sexy” really is.

Except for this guy.  This guy is sexy. 
Even my wife thinks so, and I really can't argue.

But the article’s author tries, as other similar articles on fatherhood I’ve read recently, to link the Rise of Dads with the recession, pointing out again and again that most of the jobs lost since 2008 have belonged to men.  So, you have point 1: Men being laid off; and you have point 2: More dads staying home and taking on childcare responsibility; and, most importantly, point 3: You can give it a clever man, like “mancession.”  Conclusion: Recession is causing men to be more responsible dads.

Pardon my French, but that’s crap.

As I have tried to explain elsewhere on this blog, there is a world of difference between a guy who has participated in the biological act to beget a child (kudos, by the way), and a Dad.

Having an unemployed father sitting around the house more often is as likely to turn him into a Dad as having lots of books sitting on a shelf is to make your kid smart.  Context is everything. You buy your kids lots of books, but never read to him.  Your argument is invalid. Put a stroller in front of a Dad Lite, and he’s still a Dad Lite.  Put a stroller in front of a Homebrew Dad, and observe him in his natural habitat.

"You know what the difference is between you and me? I make this look good."

Without a doubt, more guys are out of work, and more guys are choosing to work from home or stay home with the kids, which, for a Homebrew Dad, might be one of the few bright spots in an otherwise dismal economic situation.  But that doesn’t mean that being out of work equates to being a better Dad.  Interrelation does not equal causation.

No, the rise of my archetypal Homebrew Dad predates the recession by quite a bit.  It has many causes and many antecedents, but some of the ones that I’ve identified revolve around revolutions in childrearing that differ drastically from the way we Homebrew Dads were raised, and the rise of other seemingly unrelated movements, like homebrewing, Slow Food, organic foods, and the environmental movement, all of which share the common threads of challenging the previous generation’s way of doing things while consciously trying to do the right thing of the next generation, principles that helped pave the way to a different approach to fatherhood.

As fathers, we tend to reflect oour own fathers.  For some of us, we choose a straight mirror image; whether that is for good or ill depends on the kind of father you had.  Some, myself included, see our fathers and strive to be more of a curved mirror, reflecting back the same, but opposite of how we were raised, an inverted image of the old Dad Lite.

So, guys, if you’re still on the fence about this whole Homebrew Dad thing, if you think you can stick to the old Dad Lite social roles, buy yourself a nice sports car, and hit the gym rather than the playground, go ahead.  I’m long past the point where I’d even entertain the idea that I’m sexy to anybody, but for some reason, my fantastic wife has stuck with my old, cranky, graying, balding, stinky self for all these years, and it just might be because, at least to her, this Homebrew Dad is one sexy beast.

And that’s good enough for me.

Chocolate Stout: a Tutorial

Ok, folks, today we’re going to talk about chocolate stout.

Should be pretty simple.  (It isn’t.)

This is chocolate.

This is stout.

Combine, chill, and serve.  Goodnight, everybody!

Of course, it’s not really that simple.  In fact, I should probably let you in on a minor, insignificant beer secret:

There’s no chocolate in chocolate stout.

Oops, cat’s out of the bag, now.

In fact, stout is one of the most commonly misinterpreted beers out there, with all kinds of labels used that fail to accurately reflect the beer itself, not entirely unlike Taco Bell’s “beef” tacos.  (Lawsuit!  Oh Taco Bell, I kid, you know I love you.)

Even the name itself, Stout, was originally an adjective attached to another style of beer popular among working-class English, namely porter.  Our first president loved porter, though it is unclear if he liked a relatively light brown porter, or the stronger, darker, “stout” porter.  Eventually, the “porter” part was dropped and stout became synonymous with the working-class Irish, whose Guinness stout was, and still is, considered the stout by which all others are measured.

The term “stout,” I should mention, if a reference to the strength of the taste, and is completely unrelated to the strength of the alcohol.  Dry Irish stout, like Guinness, comes in at a very modest 5% (4%, if you’re in Ireland).  The strength in the taste comes from the malt and the roasting method used.  Ah, chemistry, is there anything you can’t teach us?

Over time, variations began to appear, and were given names that sort of made sense at the time, like Imperial stout.  This stout is high in alcohol and bitterness, which has nothing to do with being Imperial, that’s just the kind of stout that was exported to Russia for the enjoyment of Catherine the Great.  And as for milk stout, it contains no milk, but is so named because it contains lactose.  The lactose isn’t added to give the beer a milky flavor, it is added to make the beer sweeter.  Sweetening beer is tricky, since yeast eat sugar, but yeast don’t eat lactose, so lactose because a natural choice for sweetening brews.  To make matters worse, milk stout can also be referred to as cream stout, which seems to relate it to cream ale, which contains no lactose.  Cream ale is simply a top-fermented beer that is chilled to lager temperature during fermentation, creating a unique taste.  I have no idea why it’s called cream ale.

Chocolate stout is named in reference to the barley malt used in its production, which is roasted to such a degree that it imparts a slight bitter-sweet flavor to the beer, reminiscent of chocolate.  Hence, chocolate stout.  See?  Chocolate roasted malt.  Not chocolate.

But I like chocolate.  Especially Belgian chocolate.

I also like milk stout. 

(I’m not a hop-head, if you haven’t picked up on that yet.  Sure, I can brew a beer with a dozen different kinds of hops, like most of the other homebrewers I know, but I wouldn’t like it very much.  Hops are wonderful little herbs, absolutely essential to balance the taste of the malt, and a bitter lager can be the perfect refreshment on a hot summer day, but for the most part, hops don’t thrill me.  Sour beers, now those are interesting.  I like a beer that I can order in a brewpub and the waiter will actually ask, “Are you sure?  That’s a sour beer…”  True story, that really happened.  The guy tried to talk me out of buying a beer because it was so sour.  Point is, when I comes to stout, I like ‘em a little on the sweet side.)

So, if chocolate malt contains no chocolate, what’s a homebrewer who likes milk stout to do when a friend of his delivers right to his door fine Belgian chocolate that he brought back from a business trip to an undisclosed location?  (I hope I didn’t give anything away there.)

Why, make a chocolate milk stout, of course!

Contains no chocolate milk.  Sorry.  But it's still yummy.

This is why homebrewing is the best hobby ever.  Sure chocolate stout needs no chocolate, but does that physically prevent you from dropping in a few ounces of good Belgian chocolate at the end of the boil?  Hell, no!  Add some lactose, and that dry stout made with chocolate malt and bittering hops transforms into delicious chocolate milk stout, sweet, rich, creamy, with just a touch of bitterness to keep the chocolate from being overpowering.

There are times when I think I must be a genius.

But don’t tell anyone.

I try to be humble.