After not having updated the Miscellany section, The Daily Page has finally cast it off and given the space over to its own stable of bloggers. This action at least has the virtue of being somewhat in line with the stated positions of the publisher and news editor that equates bloggers to Visigoths battering at the door of the respectable Fourth Estate. It's a shame that Miscellany is gone because I found some good blogs there as well as some interesting articles.
We used to have a print publication that carried stuff written by bloggers. Things have certainly changed.
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A co-worker was bitching to me today that he stopped in at the Vintage Brewing Company over the weekend only to find that they didn't brew any lagers. I looked up an article about the joint and realized that I probably know the brewmaster, Scott Manning, who I think was a good friend of my good friend, (ahem) Lush.
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The Dulcinea and I went to JA Soul Food over the weekend. Like Rich Albertoni, I was the only white person in the joint. Unlike him, however, I had no fear of shaking hands the wrong way. I hope the kid in the white tuxedo had a good time at prom.
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Anyone else been watching Treme? John McWhorter has a good piece about it. Being a proud Upper Midwesterner, I appreciated this part:
The Goodman and Zahn characters are given to asserting how much more culture New Orleans has than other American cities. We all know what they mean, on a certain level. I’ve been to New Orleans a few times and certainly had a fuller experience in all ways than the two weekends I spent in Pittsburgh. Although I suppose I did not have a “real” experience according to the standards of Simon and the “Treme” characters, as I did not spend a night getting seriously trashed with a gold-toothed old (black) local, or at least I don’t recall it. And although I did spend some time outside of the French Quarter, I highly suspect it wasn’t for quite long enough, or in just the right way, in terms of the “reality” we are concerned with.
And one might ask: How, precisely, do people in Minneapolis have “less culture” than people in New Orleans? To a tribesman from New Guinea, Minnesotans would appear to have a “culture” indeed, and I’m not sure they would process New Orleans as “more cultural.” (Maybe more fun, but that’s different, isn’t it?) Why are the drinks and culinary traditions of Baltimore less “cultural” than the ones in New Orleans?
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I read that The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is going to be remade by David Fincher. While I like Fincher and am not against remakes per se, is there anything about the Swedish film that absolutely flummoxes American audiences? (Besides being in Swedish, I mean.) I've not yet seen it but I shall. It was voted best narrative film at this year's Wisconsin Film Festival so it couldn't have been all hyper-complicated and arty so why can't Americans understand that, if it ain't broke, don't fix it? For instance, why did La Femme Nikita need to be turned into the piece of crap that was Point of No Return?
4 comments:
I've enjoyed Vintage's beers so far, and Scott - as you probably already know - is a really nice guy. The facility isn't very conducive to brewing lagers, though. Without dedicated maturation tanks, the minimum amount of time I'd have each batch spend in a fermenter would be two weeks for ales and four weeks for lagers (although I'd prefer longer times for both). With four 10-barrel fermenters, Vintage's max production is about 1,040 barrels per year. When I worked at Whitney's, I believe we sold 980 barrels in 2006. At best, we could've brewed 6 lagers for every 92 ales. Vintage's challenge is even greater because they have a second location to supply. Essentially, their ability to brew lagers depends on crappy beer sales.
The good news is that the brewery has coolant hookups for two more fermenters. Unfortunately, space is already at a premium and an outside wall would need to be knocked out to install more fermenters. Scott could use his serving tanks for lagering, but that would probably create more problems than it solves.
Yes, I emailed Vintage and it is the Scott I know. Thanks for the explanation. I'll be sure to pass it along.
Sorry, but I thought McWhortor's piece on Treme was obnoxious. I'd say that article's headline, demanding that Treme "get over itself", could just as easily be directed towards McWhortor himself -if I actually believed he was being sincere. Instead, he comes across very much like the snide keyboardist he complains about: committed to dropping a turd in everyone's punchbowl just....because. "Oh, everyone loves it? Let me disagree..." Bah. Faked offense is fake.
Why do you think he was being insincere?
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