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.

Homebrew Dads for Obama (Update: 8/20/12)

Happy Independence Day, everyone!

Today, July 4^th, 2012, it is my pleasure to announce that Daddy Makes Beer officially endorses Barak Obama for reelection as President of the United States.

While President Obama is a Kenyan-born secret muslim socialist, he’s clearly the candidate for homebrewers.  Over the course of his first four years, he has passed no laws infringing on my right to keep and bear hops, so he’s got my vote.  And he’s the only candidate you can imagine sitting down and having a beer with.

That, plus I, too, am a secret muslim.

UPDATE (8/20/12):

Now, I knew President Obama was pro-beer, but I had not idea that he was a HOMEBREWER!

That's right, the White House makes its own homebrew.

Let me say that again, to be clear:  HOMEBREW IN THE WHITE HOUSE.

Without doing too much research, this looks like it might be the first instance of serious beer brewing at the White House since Thomas Jefferson.  (Yeah, he liked wine, but he made beer.)

(Washington probably homebrewed, too, but he never lived in the White House.)

And plus, Obama is also a dad, making him a Homebrew Dad!

I have to assume he reads this blog...

Daddy Makes...

It’s a hot one today.  A scorcher, you might say.

Ninety degrees, feels like 100, no breeze, no relief.

What’s a dad to do on a day like this?

Ice cold beer?  Great idea, but much less so for my dear little daughter.

Fortunately, this dad makes more than just beer. 

Daddy makes waffles.

Daddy makes dollhouses.

Daddy makes a mess.

Daddy makes cheese.

Daddy makes fire.

And on a day like this, Daddy makes ice cream!

Ice cream in a ball!  Totally taking this thing camping.

I thought the perfect thing on a blazing hot summer day like this was homemade, soft-serve blueberry ice cream.  Delicious!  (Since our blueberries were still looking a little green, I used blueberry preserves.  Don’t judge me.)

Now, time for some air conditioning and a nap.

Sometimes, Daddy makes himself tired…