Is it just my imagination, or do administrative bureaucrats at institutions of higher education in Korea seem to be the sort of people who, through sheer incompetence, simply got shuffled from position to position until they ended up behind a desk? Sometimes the people sorting bottles in community centers, working jobs created especially for people with special needs come to min, actually. Test For Theorem: Step 1: Submit an abstract for a conference. Step 2: In the process of writing the paper, realize you had it wrong in your abstract, and change the scope, content, and thrust of the paper. …
Category: PERSONAL
Question for Y’All
Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble
Okay, this has reached the point of weirdness. My Coffee Stout is still fermenting. Or, rather, once again it has begun fermenting energetically, which is, I think, a fair bit weirder than “still.” I started this one beer on the 17th of November, which puts us at just over two weeks. That in itself isn’t quite so weird, but consider this: it pretty much stopped fermenting after about five days or so. I racked it to a carboy for secondary fermentation. There it stayed until it reached about 1.010, which was the gravity the last time I checked it. I …
Dear Young Master Fancyhair
Dear Young Master Fancyhair Who Was In the Men’s Toilets Beside My Office at 15:43 Today, You’re a disgusting pig. I don’t care how much money you spent on your designer glasses frames. I don’t give a damn how much time you spent assembling your wardrobe or preening your (sadly, rather goofy looking) hair this morning. I couldn’t care less how many hours you practiced that saunter of yours, either. If you take a crap and don’t wash your hands, you are a pig. Done. End of story. Finito. There’s no excuse. You’re not in that big a hurry. You’re …
General Update
Work: I am almost completely caught up on my grading. (The only things I haven’t graded are the reaction papers I was handed last night. I do, however, also need to tabulate participation scores for student discussions — their peers have ranked them; I think I can get a trust office assistant to do most of the data entry, though, which is nice.)”I am almost completely caught up on my grading” doesn’t sound impressive, I know, but usually at this point in the semester, I have a couple of huge piles to get through. I got a bunch done on …
Shine Competition
So did I mention there’s a competition you can take part in, for the upcoming SHINE anthology? The rules are here, and the prizes are here, and here are the excerpts you need to work with to play. If you are too lazy to click on the prizes, well, the top twenty (20!) entrants get a copy of the book and a T-shirt. But the top ten get one bottle from a wonderful selection of cognacs, whiskies, and wines. Jetse knows his hooch, so you definitely ant to enter. Go on! By the way, if I showed you the story, …
Pumpkin Ale
Well, and I’ve finally arrived at the last batch of homebrew I’ll be making in November — a pumpkin ale. I couldn’t get my hands on a big old orange pumpkin — or, rather, I figured I’d have less mess and trouble, and better results, working with a smaller pumpkin. Mind you, I haven’t seen too many “sugar pumpkins” in my neck of the woods, so I went with “단호박” which are the small greenish squash one sees often in Korean groceries. They’re sweet enough when you cook them, have a decent amount of flavour, and they’re available. So anyway, …
Shine Acceptance
Well, way back when, Jetse de Vries (who, I’m pleased to see, makes me feel much better about my own lack of posting here — he hasn’t updated since summer!) announced he would be putting together a short-story collection titled Shine, featuring optimistic near-future SF. Of course, I immediately began working on something, and what do you know? When I met him this summer, he told me that he was taking the story I submitted to him. Between that and the bearhug he gave me on first meeting, Jetse made quite an impression on me, and it was a very …
Café au Stout
Brewed up another batch tonight, this one a nice coffee stout. Specific gravity ended up at 1.040 right after I mixed the wort with the water. May have actually put too much water in, not sure — the bucket I do primary ferments in now has a more-than-23-liter capacity, so I may be in for a surprise with the carboy. If that happens, I think I’ll keep the remainder in my second bucket, even though it’s usually best to dump it. (I’ll steep it in even more coffee and see what comes of it; if it fails, well, it was …
More on Beer-Making
Note, the title of this post could also be read as, “Moron Beer Making”… This weekend, I’ve already moved my wheat beer into secondary fermentation, but I’m also going to start primary fermentation for a second batch, which is — da-da-da-Daaaaaaaaaaa! — Coffee Stout! That is, a nice dark rich Stout with a hint of coffee flavoring. Just, you know, a hint. This is not the bizarre concoction I had one night out with a bunch of people organized by Roboseyo, at some little restaurant, where they made “coffee beer” by putting coffee into a glass of beer. That was …
Charlatans and Wheat Beer
No, no, this is not a rant about Charlatans. During a Youtube music swap session on chat, I ran across a track by The Charlatans which I came to know in a strange way: my mom bought the cassette tape at a garage sale and gave it to me. I basically responded with, “Huh?” The cover featured an image of a bunch of bananas. It said “Charlatans UK” — the “UK” was because some band in the States had the same name, or so someone told me years later when I was working in a music store. “I bought it …