Toasted Cake #44: “Dyscrasia”

My classmate and friend Tina Connolly has just published this week’s edition of her award-winning podcast Toasted Cake, apparently the Halloween edition; it includes her excellent reading my short story “Dyscrasia.” (If you’d like to read along, the text is online here, along with the original illustration which was, coincidentally, done by Tina herself!)

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Sour Mash Brewday: All-Brett Lambicus / Farmhouse Ale Split Batch

So, t’is the season of brewing experiments, and today, I mashed in on a brew I’ll actually be boiling up tomorrow… that’s right, I’m trying a sour mash on a double-batch of beer for the first time. I’m only planning to leave the mash souring for 24 hours, mind you, but then again,  that’s not nothing. I figured, since I have a Farmhouse Ale Blend and a smack pack of Brett L., now would be a good time to try brewing with both… especially since I’ll have a nice population of Brett L. to spike a sour beer with later on. …

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A Few Things to Realize About Bullying

Once again the world is talking about bullying. The depressing story of Amanda Todd has shown up in the world news. Even before the Amanda Todd story came out, though, I was thinking about this. I see some problems with the way we’re talking about bullying. Things that really, really irk me. I’m going to try lay them out as clearly and simply as I can:

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The 정 Challenge

This evening, Miss Jiwaku and I had a conversation with some of her relatives. These particular relatives are very nice and very decent people, good folks. But there was a line in the conversation that got me, where someone said, “But you know, as nice or polite as people in other countries might be to one another, Koreans have something unique… they have jeong.” If you haven’t run into this idea, jeong, well, then you apparently haven’t talked to many South Koreans. It gets translated variously as “harmony” or “coexistence” or all kinds of other things that sound, well, nice, but …

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Stranger Than Fiction

Over the years, I’ve heard many people point out that truth is often stranger than fiction, that one is limited in fiction to writing stories in ways that actual people were not limited, such that if one wrote a story about such-and-such a real historical figure, nobody would believe it. I am pretty dubious about this idea, to be honest. Over the years, I’ve wrestled with how to do it, and–not that I’ve published any of the projects–I have a few stories I’ve been pruning and tidying and cleaning up lately which I think demonstrate how to do this. The …

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