A carnival of technology

Hey, guess what thing that I’ve been talking about doing for years I finally did?

In celebration of that most joyous and sacred of time of the year, the receipt of the REI dividend, I visited my local outdoor equipment emporium last weekend looking to spend some more money on the bike.  For years now I’ve had ridden my bicycle with clips and straps on the pedals.  They’re a nice addition, allowing for a more complete circle in pedaling force without requiring new pedals, and, in the worst case, acting as normal pedals in those times when sloppy stomping and kicking and pulling and scraping can’t quite seem to find the clips or tighten the straps.  The downside is that it’s harder to get your foot out of a tightened strap when panic hits, though usually a quick yank will still do the job, allowing the free foot to hit the ground with bone-breaking force while, say, getting hit by a car.  They have a shallow learning curve and are can easily become an indispensable accessory.  But there are other options, hard-soled shoes that more efficiently transfer force from feet to cranks, cleats that form a more solid bond between pedal and rider.  I finally bought clipless pedals.

The transition to clipless pedals was easier than I expected, just a different sort of stomping for my free foot until I feel a click, and that’s it; no having to reach down and grab anything in the middle of climbing a hill.  I’m still not quite used to it—the cleats are never quite where I think they should be when I’m starting—but I’m getting there, and the feeling was amazing.  The hard soles alone were an incredible difference, putting so much power into moving, and I felt like part of the bike instead of just sloppily strapped into it.  After that first giddy time, though, I already started to notice room for improvement.  The pedals feel a little bit loose side to side, probably adjusted by the mechanic to be intentionally so I can get into them easier, and it’s especially noticeable on the left side.  My left is my “chocolate” foot, the one I put forward to start, and as such the one I strap or clip in first, more permanently, my right given the task of flailing and stomping and kicking around after I’m already in motion.  I mount my bicycle from the right, like a nega-horse, and I wonder now if that’s unusual.

As with most things bicycle, in shoes there is a road/mountain division that has less to do with application than comfort and price.  I chose the mountain half of things since it uses recessed cleats, thinking that I could maybe walk a little with the shoes on.  That’s mostly true: I can walk around most places with just a gentle clicking to inform bystanders that I’m an enthusiast of either tap dancing or not driving, but I’ve met some problems with one material in particular, the faux-stucco textured concrete of the stairs and breezeways and sidewalks that I have to traverse to get out of my apartment.  When the cleats hit concrete it feels and sounds like crushing gravel, which I suppose it sort of is.  Road cleats, wider things sticking out of the surface of the shoe, sometimes have rubber plugs to allow for walking, but I can’t find anything like that for these, so I’ve instead been trying to learn an unhealthy gait to compensate, something that puts my weight more on the outsides of my heels.  I made a grocery run in the new shoes, and my return home was the second time I can recall removing the panniers before ascending the stairs.  The first time was because I bought like fifty pounds of crap and was too tired to lift it all at once.  This time I was just afraid I was going to fall on my butt.

My taste in music vacillates.  The underlying problem is that I like things that are catchy and dumb, and things that are catchy and not quite as dumb, but I get bored easily.

Music is one thing that’s really shined in this insane, ADD slurry of the Web two point whatever that we live in.  As long as you already have a copy of the white album, it’s become vanishingly rare to want to hear any sort of music that isn’t available within a few dollars and a few minutes.  140 characters, one click, three levels of Frozen Bubble and you have all the smoothest tunes and hottest jams.  I love it.  I will go broke loving it if I’m not careful.

While getting bored this past weekend I decided to look around for some old avant-garde works, like that one where Alvin Lucier records and plays back and re-records a short explanation of theory and intent until the resonant frequencies of the room he’s sitting in completely engulf his speech in a weird, shimmering mass of sound.  It’s kind of neat, and it’s not on Amazon.  It is on Emusic, and I have some mixed opinions about that site.  Emusic is subscription-based, and I just don’t see a place for that kind of a service in my life.  The tracks themselves aren’t expensive, but they’re so inconvenient.  A Columbia House subscription would be more flexible.  With Emusic, you sign up at a monthly rate that comes with some monthly number of tracks, and that’s it.  More tracks requires a pricier subscription, and unused tracks disappear into the æther like cell phone minutes.  I want something that fosters impulse and exploration.  To think that I could get myself to where I want exactly twenty-five tracks every month from the same place just seems crazy to me.

I signed up for a free trial, and after getting a handful of songs, I started looking through the incoherent notes I sometimes keep for ideas on how to spend the last dozen or so trial credits.  One name I found scrawled down was Slaraffenland, a Danish group that gets labeled “experimental” even though that doesn’t mean anything.  I remember hearing them on WRAS on the way home from work one day, and the song struck me as interesting enough that I stayed in the car, parked in front of my building and pretending to look for something under the seat so that the lady getting out of the minivan next to me didn’t think I was crazy, trying to find some unique phrase in the distant, muffled yet precisely harmonized lyrics that I could search for and save myself a call to the station or another fifteen minutes waiting for the DJ to read back the track list.  It sounded like chamber pop, basically, but there was more to it than simply the “hey you guys, remember Pet Sounds?” message that this style’s current incarnation usually settles into.  There were some weird rhythms and a noise wall shifting in and out of the background and I thought it was a pretty neat thing to listen to.  I used my Emusic credits to get Slaraffenland’s latest album, released this past September, and then I found out that you can download the album from the band themselves on a system like Radiohead’s idea to pay what you want or not at all, or, more specifically, like the system used for the last Girl Talk album, where a threshold pittance gets you lossless FLACs.

I cancelled my Emusic trial subscription tonight and sent $5 to some people in Denmark.  I like music; I don’t understand why I would want to subscribe to music.

Remember a while back when I said I wasn’t using Fedora anymore?  That was a lie.  Ubuntu is the only other distro I’ve found to meet my current wants of being desktop-oriented, active and not completely ridiculous, and it and Fedora do about 80% of what I’d like them to do.  And since those 80 per-cents don’t completely overlap, I’ve ended up using both.  Fun!

Anyway, one of the little bothersome things in Fedora is that the speed of development, uncoupled from a slow-lumbering leviathan like Ubuntu’s Debian, makes some things difficult.  It creates a moving-target mess, sometimes ignored out of convenience, for third-party software, and if, for example, your favorite music player shits the bed and changes everything in the latest version, then too bad: the old one’s gone.  I’ve been keeping a handful of rpms around that allow some old libraries and packages to be installed in the new environment, and I’ve finally made a yum repository out of them.  It has two goals in mind: make it easy to install the Amazon MP3 downloader, and bring back Amarok 1.4.

http://reallylongword.org/longcompat/11/i386/longcompat-release-1-1.fc11.noarch.rpm

There’s also a release package for Rawhide, but it’s just the same thing; either one will work.  Installing the repository will make available the dependencies for amazonmp3.rpm, and it includes a package for Amarok as amarok14.  You’ll have to hit the yes I’m serious button a few times and input the root password a whole bunch as is usual for these things, but otherwise it’s all signed and everything and should just do its thing.

While putting this together I created a sort of build system, and while it’s sort of sloppy—it calls mock about a billion times for every little thing and I don’t think it uses timestamps quite right—but still, it’s the culmination of several heaping tablespoons of annoying google searches, trial and error and Makefile targets borrowed from previous projects, and I thought it might be helpful to put it all in one place for anyone who might be trying to do something similar.  It’s on github at http://github.com/reallylongword/longcompat.  Let me know if something goes horribly wrong or if you have any suggestions.

One the peculiarities of the American experience is that so many of us are never quite sure what we are.  We are obsessed with genealogy, and robbing most African-Americans of the depth of this investigation is counted among the lasting crimes of slavery.  It’s not about pedigree or title so much as simply searching for an identity.  We’re not quite sure how to be American, so we look to the family tree for those moments of emigration and try to be whatever those moments say instead.

I take part annually in this appeal to heritage: every March 17th I’ll don the green, boil some meat and cabbage and potatoes until it’s all mushy, drink some stout and a shot or two of whiskey and shout half-pronounced toasts and oaths along with a bunch of other stout-and-whiskey drinking, green-clad people.  I’m not Irish.  A couple of my great-great grandparents were Irish, a few of the rest of them might have been Irish and a lot of them were something else, and through variety and time I’m just another jeans-wearing, rap-and-country-listening, bourbon-drinking American.  And that’s ok!  There is a history and a culture in that, however briefly established; but it’s fun to pretend.

Today I hung out with people pretending to be a different kind of Gaelic at the Stone Mountain Highland Games.  It had a little more authenticity than an unplanned annual bar crawl, bringing in the local British Consul-General and Lord McFauntleroy of Glenwhatever to kick things off, but the attendance was much the same.  There were a handful of Scots, from Scotland, and a whole bunch of Americans who followed a particular line on their family tree to a muddy field beneath the Redneck Rushmore and found a chance to dress up and drink and dance and throw some heavy things around.  It was a fun place to be, and a little different from anything I’ve seen among my Plastic Paddy brethren, something with the same sentiments but much more organization.

The oddest thing to me was the clans.  Both the Irish and Scottish organized themselves in ancient times around little fiefdoms allied to a local Lord, but the Irish system was destroyed pretty much entirely by the period of Everything Is Horrible that lasted roughly between the Norman discovery of the Emerald Isle and the post-Victorian establishment of the Republic.  The Scottish concept of clans, however, survived both the English assimilation and the American diaspora, resulting in a long semicircle of tents here bearing names and tartans and crests, each with an organization with dues and newsletters and some feeling of an history.  The tartans were something new to me.  I’d thought of the plaid in those funny skirts that all the men wear as little more than a local aesthetic, but the choice of color and pattern that goes into the things bears a sign of one’s allegiance to some family or another.  In some contexts it’s serious, but in others no one really cares: Sharon’s clan identified her on sight by the clothes she wore, but I was also able to buy an umbrella (something I’d been meaning to do since about the time 285 flooded) bearing the MacDonald crest without so much as a blink, and clothing of all sorts in whatever greens and reds and blues and yellows you might desire were available from a dozen different vendors.  Some stuck herbs and branches in their hats as a show of solidarity with whomever they call kin, while the various drum and pipe bands took up whatever tartans happened to be convenient.  The details were signs of a particular type of Scot or Scottishness in general as the need arose.

The costumes, though steeped in tradition, aren’t something that folks are going to wear every day, so there was sometimes a con cosplay feel to it, a parade of fantastic objects and dress.  What was missing was the sense of competition and the sense of artificiality.  These were people not manufacturing the appearance of something false with creatively-constructed false things, but people dressing and accessorizing with real things to create a real, personal look.  That dude with the ostrich feathers and the mace?  He looked a lot finer than a lot of people there, but he looked like he earned it, and his presence didn’t lessen the meaning or importance of the outfit worn by the mohawked guy with the kilt and sporran.

The games themselves were the traditional Scottish things: dance, drums and pipes, and feats of strength.  There was a kind of extreme hammer toss where men the sizes of bulls struggled to throw a weight down a field, a caber toss, and some thing where a bag of I don’t care to know what was pitched over a bar that must have been about fifty feet high.  It was pretty silly and terrifying; I was pretty sure one of those airborne stone blocks was going to kill someone at one point, but no one even flinched.  As for the music…eh.  Bagpipes have such a limited range that it all starts to sound the same after a short while.  I’ll stick with the Irish and their Uilleanns on this one.

Alongside all of this was something more like a county fair: people selling trinkets and gewgaws and fried dough and scotch eggs.  It was a lot of fun!  I found a vendor from Northern Ireland and bought a nice tweed cap.  Utilikilt was also there, trying to create a new fashion of everyday dresses for every gender separated from the symbols and meanings of the clans.  The whole thing was a fun and strange thing that a lot of people hitched their heritage to, and why not that?  It’s a chance for a little borrowed history and a lot of good times.

I’m still coming to terms with the look of my new eyeglasses; some days I think they’re grand, others I think they look like I’m getting a head start on a midlife crisis.  They have a forced European look to them: a Scandanavian minimalism of structure combined with an Italian approach of catching angles and lines.  Maybe it works on my face.  I don’t know.

I bought a fancy, name-brand anti-glare coating this time around.  My eyes are no longer obscured by a curtain of flash.  And the dirt is no longer obscured by a constant, ignorable lens flare.  I have a lot of trouble keeping these lenses clean.  The cloth they came with is pretty  useless, and I spend much more time rubbing away with various careful solvents and microfiber rags than I ever used to.  I’m past the point where I’m comfortable with wiping the lenses on my shirt, but some shirts are better than others: the various soft organic cottons feel like the safest choice, but the roughly textured silks and rayons of my faux-Alohas are the most effective.  Everything else is somewhere in between.  On the most positive side, the lenses have survived my daily carelessness and abuses with nary a scratch, so maybe that expensive coating was worth the trouble.

Did I really buy a pair of Oakleys?  I honesty don’t know what to make of that.  Oakley was the Ray-Ban of the 90’s, but the 90’s are the past, and maybe that’s time enough that Oakley can go back to being just another purveyor of eyewear fashion, something separated by time from surfboards or black trenchcoats or sloppy mod revivals or any of the unfortunate choices and thoughts and decisions and connotations that plague any and every time.  I like the color of my new specs.  I hope that no one notices the logo.

Domain names used to be expensive.  Network Solutions had a monopoly on .com, .org and .net, and they charged $100 for two years and wouldn’t let you use any dirty words.  But all of that ended in 2000.  Network Solutions kept the database, but they had to open it up to resellers for $6/year, several of which appeared offering domains at a fraction of Network Solution’s long-suffered prices.  I didn’t buy a name until these new companies had just started to form, and I went with one that some web site recommended as having a fair price, fair terms and good support.  It was the terms of service that set them apart: they emphasized that the buyer owned the name and that the registrar was acting only as a broker, a concern that born from the appearance of all of these companies with vague definitions of who owns what.  Also, they’re French.

It came to time to renew some names, so I headed over Gandi and hit some buttons, and that sent me to a Crédit Mutuel page to pay up.  Punched in the Wachovia card number, and declined.  Huh.  The CVV is pretty well worn off, so I figured I just typed it in wrong.  I tried another Visa card that worked just fine, but about a minute after the phone rings.  The bank wanted to go over the last few transactions on my account to make sure that there’s nothing fishy.  While I’m assuring them that I really did spend that much at the grocery store the other day and yeah I guess it is about time for the DSL payment to go through, Wachovia called and left a message for me to do the same thing with them.  I’m glad that they’re watching for that kind of thing, but it seems weird for it to happen now.  My spending habits are kind of erratic to begin with, and no one seemed to mind when I was withdrawing from Icelandic ATMs like I’d stolen something (or like it took me three or four days to figure out how much the money is worth).  Maybe it’s because this was over the Internet?  Maybe it’s because those ATMs are on the American side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge?  I don’t know what in particular triggered the alert, but it’s good to know that they care.

Dear Fedora,

I think that the Fedora project has some pretty good ideas for how a Linux distribution should work.  Releases are frequent enough to keep everything shiny and new but, guided by Redhat’s commercial interests, are made with goals of pragmatism and stability.  There’s enough of a community to keep a wide range of software available and well-tested.  The focus on problems faced by desktop and laptop users ensures an intuitive, easy-to-use environment that avoids the pitfalls and annoyances that have plagued Linux in the past.  Or at least it would nice if any of that were true.

I have been using Linux since 1998 around the release of Redhat Linux 5.0.  Linux has changed a lot since then, and so have I.  At first I used it as a kind of toy, a new electronic place where the various switches and cogs of the system were thrown into stark relief for the curious.  When I started studying computers and computation at Georgia Tech, Linux, along with the other UNIX-based and UNIX-inspired operating systems available there, went from toy to a tool where the languages of computers were not tied up in projects and expensive programs but were a basic part of the system, available in every corner to transmute ideas into decisions.  And at some point in there this programmer’s playground and user’s nightmare began to transform into something more accessible.  Subsystems and tools appeared at every layer, from the kernel to the desktop environment, to make configuration easier—and automatic at best—and Linux finally started to do things in a way that people expect.  Manipulating files on a USB drive went from a four-step process to something that poppped up in front of you as soon you plugged it in.  Wireless networking hid its arcane files and drivers behind a simple window asking for a password.  Things started to just work.  All of that brings me to today, when I have less of a reason to use Linux at home, but I keep using it because I have little reason not to.  That, and because the first thing Vista did on my laptop was reletter the drives and crash.  So throw what you know.

I’ve been through a handful of different distributions over this decade, one of which I was partly responsible for making myself, and I last settled on Fedora because I had hoped it would be the most feature-rich and well-supported option.  It hasn’t worked very well.  Part of Fedora’s semiannual release schedule is an expectation for at-least annual upgrades, but lately every upgrade has, in some way, made things worse.  Pulseaudio and NetworkManager are two changes that, at least at first, were desultory in their integration, seemingly appearing as change for the sake of change, but it’s not only an eagerness to adopt all of the upstream developer’s new problems that repels Fedora from its potential.  There are some serious issues in the underlying management of the Fedora Project.

Fedora Release Engineering does not understand the word “release”

I upgraded to Fedora 11 on June 9th, not forty-eight hours after the release hit the mirrors.  The first thing it did after booting was install 178 new updates.  Every release is a new moving target.  There usually aren’t any major upgrades within a release, but packagers get around this by pushing in pre-release versions of software slated to come out in less than six months.  Both Thunderbird and Mozilla were beta versions, not yet stable enough for the Mozilla developers to be confident but apparently good enough for Fedora.

Whether anything works or not from day to day is reduced to a game of chance.  With Fedora 11 I couldn’t use an external monitor anymore.  Suspend to memory, which didn’t work right in 10, worked at first, and then after another batch of updates it didn’t.  Usability changed from day to day as new versions were marked as important security updates and as I kept installing every new package in the hopes that some of the broken features would finally start to work.  It feels like the only difference between Rawhide, the development branch where every half-thought software commit becomes a new set of updates, and an actual release is that the release will stop updating itself after a year or so.

The desktop team is not doing their job

The people in charge of creating Fedora’s desktop environment do a good job of building and packaging the upstream software, which I admit is no mean task, but they do a really crappy job of creating a consistent user experience.  Take burning a CD for instance.  It used to be that you popped in a blank CD, a new window would pop up that you could drag some things into, and then you hit a button and a CD happened.  That was pretty nice.  If the auto-load feature didn’t work for whatever reason—maybe you’re burning to a CD-RW that already has data on it—there was a “CD/DVD Creator” in the Applications menu that took care of things for you.  In all everything was pretty simple and straightforward.  After a while the CD/DVD Creator moved from Applications to Places.  And then something called Brasero would pop up sometimes, and sometimes it would work and sometimes not.  Whichever program popped up first stopped being able to blank a CD before writing, so you had to do that separately.  Sometimes the CD would eject when it was done, sometimes not.  It was still better than trying to remember the litany of options to pass to cdrecord on the command-line, but it was inconsistent for no reason.

There’s no attention to detail, and the details will flit from place to place depending on the release or the whims of the packager.  Sometimes programs are given an opaque name, sometimes described by what they do, sometimes both.  It’s easy to blame upstream changes on changes in the packaged result, but Fedora is supposed to be there to mediate and interpret the whims of GNOME and Freedesktop and everyone else.  Even if things stay consistent within a particular Fedora release, six months is an awfully short time to be allowed to remember where everything is.

Testing doesn’t seem to test very much

I know that it’s impossible to test everything, but the things I’ve noticed especially wrong seem really obvious.  Switching to an external monitor consistently fails.  When I return from suspend, the laptop immediately suspends itself again.  Changing the volume causes the currently playing sound to skip.  Maximizing firefox causes it to cram itself into the upper-left corner of the screen, and notifications from thunderbird or firefox, which are aiming for the bottom-right corner, appear in the middle of the screen.  I’m not using any particularly weird hardware: it’s just a Lenovo laptop with the integrated Intel chipsets for everything, the same kind of hardware that’s been on every Intel board since the early aughts.  It’s a pretty common case, and one with a reputation for having excellent Linux support, but it sucks at running Fedora.  Maybe a six-month cycle is too short?  I don’t know, but it’d be nice to have something a little more polished.

I’d really like to use Fedora.  It seems to have the most sane attitude among the various distributions around today.  But I’d like more to use something that works.  I hope that someday Fedora does.

Your friend,
David

So I went to Iceland last week.  I had some money and some vacation saved up, I was already hopping on planes and going places on account of Chris’s getting hitched (congratulations!), and I just wanted to get out of the country for a while and see something new.  Here is my self-indulgent attempt to document the trip.

One bit of common wisdom about the Scandinavian islands is that Greenland is made of ice and Iceland is green.  This is a gross over-simplification.  Iceland is the Alaska of Scandinavia: it’s a barren, inhospitable land, full of active volcanoes, frequent earthquakes from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge a few miles east of Reykjavík, and, by the standards of a travellin’ Southern boy, some really awful weather.  A day over 50°F is a good day in the summer, and the varied landscape of oceans and rivers and glaciers and volcanoes ensures a constant, brutal wind nearly everywhere on the island.  The most common sight is a lava field, craggy rocks reminiscent of the American southwest, covered in the only green that so much of the land can support: moss.  Agriculture consists of a handful of hot spring greenhouses and a whole lot of pasture.  The only creatures that can survive on this island are sheep, some curious-looking hairy horses, a fox or two and a bunch of stubborn Icelanders.  To say that the island is green is very misleading.

Icelanders have a reputation of being awful drivers, but I didn’t see it.  Maybe I’m just used to bad driving.  They seemed to make do pretty well in a country where pretty much anything outside the one city is a poorly-maintained country road.  The speed limit is a reasonable 90kmh, and I didn’t see anyone crash or veer of the road or cut someone off even once.  One thing I found interesting with their traffic signals—and maybe this is something they do elsewhere in Europe, I don’t know—is that lights would do the usual green, yellow, red thing, and then the red light would add a yellow again just before the green, letting drivers know when to get ready, and, by encouraging everyone to jump the light a little bit, ensuring that no one ever ran a red.

I have a weird knack for blending in a lot of the time when I travel.  If I stay somewhere long enough I’ll be asked for directions or advice or whatever one asks a local, but here it meant that a lot of people assumed I could speak Icelandic.  Of course it’s reasonable to address someone in your native land in your native language, but it seemed a little weird when in a knickknack shop for tourists, stuck behind people unable to figure how to spend a Euro or a dollar, to get to the front and be greeted by a cheerful “Get ég hjálpað þér?”  I feel like I should have at least learned the numbers.  I think I let a lot of people down with my constant English apologies.

Iceland has better Mexican food than New England, but it’s still not quite up to par.  I guess it’s a little hard to get some of the herbs and spices, like cilantro or adobo, but at least one place there knows how to swing a pepper.  The Indian dude must have had some connecs; that daal I had for lunch one time was delicious.

My first meal in Reykjavík was in a vegetarian restaurant full of people in keffiyehs, copies of an English language alt-weekly spread around and Joanna Newsom on the stereo.  I’m not sure if that says more about Reykjavík or about me.

Since I was too lazy to write anything on Monday.  Today we have a beer from Michigan that was quite pleasant and a beer from California that I was expecting to hate.

#44: Third Coast Old Ale

Internet says that Old Ale is a separate style, but I’m not convinced.  The Bell’s Brewery website further confuses things by calling it a barleywine, and it seems a lot like a barleywine, so I’m going to think of it in those terms.  It poured a hazy, dark orange, with a smell full of yeasty bread, apples, oranges, and, just before you start to think that maybe is this some Belgian abbey concoction instead, a gust of grassy, flowery hops.

This is a pretty nice tasting beer.  It’s thick and feels a little syrupy with a caramel taste, some oak flavor, a lot of malts and a bit of a sour, roasty edge.  The hops are sharp but not too intense, and there’s a hot alcohol feeling that sneaks it’s way through the flavors.  Overall it’s a big, sweet sipping sort of beer.  I think I’ll revist the rest of the six-pack in the winter.

#45: Arrogant Bastard Ale

And now something from the other side.  I’ve never had anything from the Stone Brewing Company, but in what I’ve read about them I haven’t seen much to like.  For one, they seem like the sort of brewery that mistakes hops for creativity, and for another their marketing schtick is just infuriating.  There’s a rule of thumb in advertising: don’t talk about the competition.  It makes your product appear unable to stand on its own merits, and, worse, it makes people think about the competition during the impression for your brand, so if you decide to bring up the other guys you’d better have a good reason for it.  Arrogant Bastard doesn’t directly attack the competition so much as it does their connoisseurs in a virulent appeal to elitism.  I agree that there are some pretty bland popular beers out there, but drinking them doesn’t make you a bad person.  Drinking them doesn’t even make you unable to enjoy other, more complex beers.  Some of those big-name beers have a bit more going on than the “tasteless fizzy yellow beer” credit they get, and there’s more to answering tastelessness than razing a field of hops.  I started with pretty low expectations.

My dread was confirmed as I poured the bottle and I caught a strong, distinct whiff of pine tar.   But it disappeared quickly, leaving a beer that really didn’t smell like much of anything, so maybe that was just a fluke.  I took a sip, and…nope, there’s the hops.  And that’s all there is.  It’s not something as intensely unpleasant as my experience with Sierra Nevada’s Torpedo, but I couldn’t find anything to like.  It was very bitter and astringent, there’s hardly anything to balance it, and that oily taste and feel of the piney Cascade hops stuck around well past its welcome.  As it warmed up a sweet malty flavor started to emerge, but not nearly enough.  I can drink this beer; it doesn’t make my throat close up or make me want to spit it out, but I’m just not happy about drinking this beer.  I kept a glass next to me while writing this, and every now and then I’d pick it up, forget what I was drinking, not smell much of anything in particular for a warning, and wham! another senseless, unhinged hop punch.

I like hops, but I don’t like hops in a vacuum.  The first beer of tonight’s reviews had a lot of hops, and it would have been poorer without them.  They added some different tastes that barley and yeast alone can’t provide, and they kept the big wallop of malt from being undrinkably thick.  Even beers with a strong hops focus can be pretty nice, but geez, dial it down a notch or two, and use some more interesting hops, something that doesn’t just taste like trees and dirt.  Club soda and bitters is more interesting, and more pleasant, than this beer.

If this were another beer I’d just shrug it off as unremarkable and move on, but the ad copy that accompanies this one makes it maddening: the accusation that I’m to blame for not enjoying this garbage instead of whoever thought it’d be a good idea to remove the malt taste from an IPA of the worst American sort, the idea that rejecting a company out-of-hand is any less blind brand loyalty than simply drinking their products, the sneering, holier-than-thou attitude backed by nothing more than the abuse of a curious European flower.  You were right, Arrogant Bastard: this beer is not for me.  Because it sucks.

The Third Coast Ale really was quite nice; I don’t want that idea to get lost just because I have another reason to hate California.

Oops, I guess I have a bit of a backlog now.  The bar where I drank the last of these was pretty dead, so let’s see if I can’t turn some incoherent notes into sloppy paragraphs and catch up a bit.

#41: Smuttynose Hanami

Smuttynose is another brewery whose beers have just recently started showing up on the banks of the Chattahooch’.  They’re from New Hampshire, and I’m pretty sure I sampled some of their wares during  moments of lucidity on that awful New Year’s trip a while back, but I can’t remember which ones.  So for this project I just picked out what looked like the strangest.

Cherries are thought to originate somewhere in the Mediterranean—Italy or Turkey or somewhere in there—but it was the Japanese that figured out that, besides being a tasty fruit, it’s a pretty dang pretty tree, so why don’t we throw a party when it starts to bloom.  Thanks to a century-old gift from Japan, we in the US have our own version of Hanami, the cherry blossom festival in DC.  Appreciating the cherry blossoms got kind of awkward when we started bombing the shit out of each other, but that’s not the kind of thing that just goes away.  For once a year the National Mall is litered not with plastic bottles and burger wrappers, but with pretty pink flowers.  The Smuttynose beer doesn’t have much to do with the flowers; they just used the fruit.

I’m a little wary of cherry-flavored beers, because children’s cough syrup ruined me.  The one I remember best, Lindemans Kriek, I absolutely can’t stand because it makes me think of Dimetapp.   But Hanami won we over in a couple of ways: it’s a cherry-flavored ale instead of a cherry lambic, so the cherries are a flourish and not the focus, and the cherry flavor is more tart than sweet.  Hanami has a sweet barley taste with a little bit of hops, and the cherries add a sour note that it keeps it interesting.  It’s pretty nice.

#42: Ayinger Celebrator

I’m not very familiar with bock beers, so this was something new.  A bock is basically a strong German lager, and a doppelbock is even more so, a dark, thick, powerful product of the Reinheitsgebot that has something to do with goats for some reason.  I got this one in a four-pack, and these bottles have a lot of heft.  They’re thick and brown, and each one adorned with a little plastic ram hanging from a red string.  This beer is certainly serious about whatever it is.

The beer itself is dark brown, and it smells like a dark ale, lots of roasted malts and hops and chocolate.  It’s full of flavor, bready and slightly sour malts, molasses and a big hop bite, but somehow it stays smooth and creamy and very drinkable.  This is a big beer that manages to stay just on the side of subtlety.   And it’s tasty; I like it.

#43: Guinness 250

There’s an old Irish proverb that I’m either paraphrasing or just made up: no matter how far or how long you travel, you can always find a comfort at home.  I took to Guinness pretty early on, and not just because I’m fake Irish.  The small, divey bars throughout Atlanta tend to keep on tap some varieties of Budweiser, and Miller and Coors, and 420 on tap if you’re lucky, or Pabst Blue Ribbon if you’re close to Little 5.  And Guinness, the big, dark-handled tap in the corner with the funny-looking nozzle.  I often drink Guinness, and honestly, it’s not all that good.  There’s a world of difference between Guinness in a can or a bottle—regardless of what kind of plastic they shove into the container—and Guinness on tap, but even then, despite its reputation among those that prefer the Bud, or the Millers or the Coors of being a big, bready meal in a glass, it’s kind of bland, kind of watery.  It’s a fine beer for drinking a lot of beer with some friends over a pizza and a baseball game on the big TV, but if you’re looking for a beer for thinkers and poets, a beer with feeling and a flourish, Guinness isn’t the place to start.

But it’s hard to hate on Guinness.  They too often make the best beer in the bar, those toucan ads make some pretty neat art and are powerful enough that I still, somewhere in the back of my mind think that drinking the stuff is a healthy endeavour, and the head of the brewery in the 1950’s, after he got in a (presumably drunken) argument over some sort of senseless trivia, created the Guinness Book of Records so that bars could keep it on hand and cleanly settle future arguments over ridiculous bullshit.  I guess it’s kind of like Jack Daniel’s: I don’t think so highly of the actual product, but there’s so much storied history in the producer that I can’t help but love them.  Guinness 250 is a milestone in that history, marking the 250th anniversary of Arthur Guinness sigining, at £45 per year, a 9,000 year lease for the brewery at St. James Gate.  I bet that landlord is feeling mighty stupid.

The first thing that’s clearly different about Guinness 250 is that there’s no nitrogen.  There’s no downward cascade of tiny bubbles, just a black beer with a fluffy white head, matching the tap handle without any intermediate settling, and rather than staying big and thick to leave a tan curtain down the side of the glass, the head eventually settles into a few thin puddles.  And then there’s the smell, oh my goodness.  There’s a big burnt barley smell with a strong sour edge, and the taste is more of the same.  The roasted malt is something bordering on imperial, and the carbonation lends a big, sharp kick.  It’s a straightforward beer, but it’s big and crisp, and it tastes like a stout ought.  It’s really a shame that this is only a one-time thing.