Does Anyone Remember Lakefront's Bimetallic Beer?

Does anyone remember Lakefront's Wisconsin Bimetallic Beer? It was brewed for the Wisconsin Bimetallic Corporation in Sullivan because, if memory serves, Lakefront's owner or brewmaster was friends with the owner/head honcho of WBC. A friend of mine was buddies with a WBC employee and got his greedy hands on a few bottles of it. I recall having it back in 1996 although I think they also brewed it for WBC again the following year.

It was a holiday brew and I think it had the usual spices like cinnamon and clove. I also remember it being big. Very big. It certainly warmed us up before we headed out to the East End or wherever we went that cold winter night.

Anyone else sample this stuff? Was Lakefront brewing the Holiday Spice at that time?

New Brew, New Brewery

Milwaukee's Big Bay Brewing has a new beer: Long Weekend IPA.





Wasn't this stuff at the Great Taste? I really like Big Bay's Kölsch and was happy to see them brew a style that's mostly shunned by Wisconsin craft brewers. So yet another IPA doesn't do much for me. However, a porter is due from them in the fall.





I recently discovered that Eau Claire has a new brewery - Lazy Monk Brewing. The owner, Leos Frank, is from the Czech Republic and he brews mostly Bohemian and German styles: pilsner, dunkel, Märzen, OctoberFest, and a Baltic Porter. It appears to be available on tap and in growlers and only in the EC area. Good excuse for a road trip.

Blade Runner Convention Reel

"One of the Blade Runner Convention Reels featuring interviews with Ridley Scott, Syd Mead and Douglas Trumbull about making Blade Runner universe. This 16 mm featurette, made by M. K. Productions in 1982, is specifically designed to circulate through the country's various horror, fantasy and science fiction conventions."

Wither the Orpheum?

There's some bad blood between the owners of the Orpheum and now their webpage is gone. The domain has expired and is pending renewal.

As someone who has Primus tickets for their show at the Orpheum in October, I sure hope that this is merely forgetfulness on someone's part or indicative of ownership change as opposed to the theatre going under.

Women Fighters? With No Cleavage?!

No cleavage and no mini-chain mail skirt just looks odd. However, she looks like a bad ass, albeit with a large encumbrance factor.





From Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor.

Jesus Self-Pic

Basboosa for Breakfast

I had basboosa for the first time this weekend it was fantastic. I got it at People's Bakery. The guy behind the counter said it was made with semolina flour and coconut and had a honey glaze. Not overly sweet, which I appreciated. Made for a nice breakfast.

Great Taste of the Midwest 2011

While I did my Great Taste of the Midwest pre-blogging, I haven't said anything about the fest itself. So here goes.





Having chatted with Kirby Nelson from Capital the night before, I set out to try his bourbon barrel imperial doppelbock. I walked up to the booth and he was there. For better or for worse, he remembered me. Here it is:





My notes, as far as I can decipher them, say that it had a nice bourbon flavor. Strong but not overpowering but with a nice alcohol bite. Good for chillier weather. I presume it'll be bottled at some point.

I had a list of brews that I wanted to try and realized after the fact that I missed a bunch of them. However, I did try a number of them. Dark Horse's Kmita Kölsch was really good with its notes of biscuit and nice hop finish. A perfect beer for the sunny, warm day. They were also pouring a beer brewed with jalapeno. It too was really tasty. The jalapeno was prominent but didn't kill your palate. I can see it pairing with food really well.

5 Rabbit Cerveceria on Chicago's south side bills itself as the first Latin microbrewery in the States. I can't dispute that but I can say that their 5 Lizard was very good. It's a wheat beer with passion fruit. The brew was very effervescent with passion fruit and some variety of hops that have a grapefruit flavor vying for your taste buds.





There were other Chicago breweries there as well. I really liked Metropolitan's Iron Works Alt (and their fancy taps as well). This stuff had more hoppiness than other alts I've had. Granted, I don't think I've ever had a true altbier from Düsseldorf so I'm certainly no expert on the style, but the ones I have tasted were low on the hops scale. Iron Works had a nice biscuity aroma and flavor which contrasted well with the hoppy finish. While there were more hops here than traditionally used in the style, this is no brew for hop warriors.

For all the good stuff I've heard about Half Acre, they proved disappointing. The Small Animal Big Machine was boring. It smelled sour and tasted sour, with a bit of hops to boot. I just found it unremarkable. Ambrosia was the same. I believe it's a kind of wit, a wheat beer with orange and hibiscus replacing coriander. A nice floral aroma was a good start and I like hibiscus, but it had this sharp flavor which didn't do anything for me. Their beers just seemed to lack a malt backbone. Hell, maybe it was my tongue. I'll certainly give them another shot.

They also served me the worst beer of the festival. I don't know what happened and am hoping that I just got a mis-pour. I was looking forward to their Brandy Barrel Aged Crusch Kölsch – a Kölsch "finished with white peach puree, honey, and a kiss of brandy". Sounds perfect. I'd swear that I watched my glass get filled from the Crusch tap. It had the right color for a Kölsch. Everything was looking grand. Then I tasted it. It was just another watery sour. Was it bad? Was the wrong barrel tapped? Something went terribly awry. I hope they try that again because I'd love to taste the right beer.

A digression for the ladies. Ladies, if you want a middle aged man to compliment you on your attire, wear an old skool Marillion t-shirt like I did.





'Nuff said.





I tasted Short's Cornholio, a dunkel with horehound, beach plums, and red popcorn. (Unsurprisingly, it was a collaboration with Dogfish Head.) The nose was mild and I couldn't taste any of the exotic ingredients. However, I thought it was a good dunkel. Also on the dunkel front, I had Backpocket's Slingshot. I went to their booth hoping to try their German Pale Ale but they didn't have it. Dunkel it was. I felt it had all the components of a nice dark lager but just not enough. A bit watery.

Barley John's Wild Brunette appealed to me as it had wild rice in it. My notes say this brown ale had a rather bitter finish but a distinct paucity of wild rice flavor. My guess is that this is only the second beer brewed with wild rice that I've ever had and I prefer Capital's brew.

O'Fallon's Hemp-Hop-Rye was a fine beer. Normally these days an amber ale with a C-hop doesn't appeal to me but I overlooked this because of the hemp and rye. I sniffed a nice rye aroma and found it to have a mild flavor with that rye crispness and only moderate hoppiness. Like I said, amber ales aren't high on my list of beers these days but this was really good.

At the Surly booth I grabbed their Smoke, a smoked Baltic porter aged on oak. Pretty good. My notes say that I didn't find it overly smoky. In fact, I didn't find it overly anything and found it to be a middle of the road kind of brew.

The Dulcinea and our friend James spend what I consider to be an inordinate amount of time hanging around the booths of meaderies. The folks from White Winter were hawking a new (or newish) drink called Kinky Blues. I'm not sure if is just their Blueberry Spritz rehoolied or what. Regardless, it had a nice blueberry-floral aroma. On the tongue it was bubbly and full of blueberry goodness. Great stuff.

B. Nektar Meadery became a mandatory Great Taste stop the first time we tried their mead a few years ago. I sampled their Belle Isle Belgian-Style Melomel and, man!, it was good. A melomel is simply a mead with fruit. Honey, cherry juice, and hops – a great combination. The cherry was very rich and I'd say it was semi-sweet. This was really great. In fact, I think The D and James also went with it and they were impressed as well.





As for Wisconsin breweries, I tried a few.

New Glarus was serving their two new brews, Laughing Fox and Black Top. Laughing Fox is a Kristal Weizen with nice clove & banana aroma and flavor. I have to wonder why this gets a late summer release as I'd much rather satisfy my weizen craving with this during the hot, hazy days of summer than Dancing Man. DM is a much bigger beer and more appropriate for a September release. Black Top is a Black IPA or whatever the hell this style is called. The aroma is of citrus hops and this carries into the flavor as well but underneath them are chocolatey undertones. This was my first sample of the style and I liked it a lot. It was rather smooth with the hop bitterness being balanced by the malt.

Dave's Brew Farm was serving up Rauch'N Lager. Aside from a good rauchbier being a thing of beauty, one nice thing about them is that they're not very popular which means you don't have to worry about them running out. This one surprised me with a fruity aroma that also held a hint of smoke. It was pretty much the same when I drank it. It was light on the rauch but very crisp – almost fruity. The guide said it was almost 8%ABV but I didn't taste it.

I can barely read my notes for the Stonefly brew I tasted. As near as I can tell it was their 53212 amber lager. If I read my writing correctly, I liked the malt sweetness but found it a bit too hoppy on the back end. At the O'so booth I went with Spike's Maple, an amber ale made entirely with maple sap instead of water. A very Wisconsiny thing to do. Its aroma was hoppy yet sweet. As I expected, it had a very mild maple flavor. I learned long ago up in Stone Lake in more than a foot of snow one April that it takes 40-50 quarts of sap to get a quart of syrup. (Thanks dad.) I rather liked this stuff. The maple wasn't cloying and it was just very refreshing.

I had wondered how Vintage had managed to get a tent all to themselves. I mean, this would be their – what? – second appearance at the GT. So how did they pull it off?





So I chatted up Scotty, above. We've known one another since college so I used my place in his heart to find out. Apparently he was a little drunk at some point last year and made a bet that Vintage could break the world record for most beers at the Great Taste. He awoke the next morning and immediately started to cellar brews. Apparently the GT organizers relented when he informed them that he had three dozen beers ready to go. Vintage had the tent decked out like a living room (see above) with 3 or 4 separate groups of taps all featuring different beers.

I sampled three of their brews but I'd had a couple already. The new one to me was the Tippy Toboggan roggenbier. Most beers that I've had which use rye in the grain bill try to get the zing of the rye to pair up with a fair amount (or more) of hop bitterness. I've never had a roggenbier from Germany. I've never seen one for sale so I am no expert on the style. But Scotty spent time in Germany and I'm going to guess here that his take is closer to what you get over there as opposed to what U.S. craft brewers generally make. Having said all that, I found TT to be fantastic. You got the rye crispness balanced with fruity flavors and malt sweetness instead of competing with hop bitterness. If this is his winter seasonal, then bring on the snow.

I am probably missing a few brews here, but that's where my notes end. No doubt The D and James passed me their glasses for a taste and I just didn't write anything down. The rhubarb saison from Dave's Brew Farm was one beer I never got around to trying. I somehow managed to avoid Jolly Pumpkin completely. D'oh! I did grab something from the Real Ale tent but can't remember what it was. I had ducked in from the rain and grabbed something but, having my poncho on, I was unable to take notes.

A few final observations. I think there were more food vendors or at least some different ones this year. More bands as well. The Three Floyds line was ridiculously long. I presume people were lining up for Dark Lord. I didn't see anyone carted off in an ambulance. Much to my dismay, the programs didn't have any blank pages to take notes on and they instead offered a downloadable cheat sheet hoolie for you to print out. I hope the MHTG changes this next year. Chicago's brewing scene is really growing.

Did anyone notice any trends this year? The only thing that I noticed which was newish was the use of hibiscus. Not that everyone had a beer with it but it seemed more prevalent than in years past.

All in all, despite the rain, it was a fine Great Taste.

Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg

My little venture into the world of Scandinavian crime thrillers continued with Peter Høeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow. I almost didn't buy it because it had been made into a film which makes absolutely no sense because lots of fine books have been made into movies. (Not necessarily fine movies, mind you.) It's popularity just tainted it somehow for me. Luckily I overcame my knee-jerk reaction and picked it up because it's a fantastic novel.

My previous encounters with the genre were generally not afraid to set themselves during the winter when it was cold and there was snow. Høeg ups the ante here with his heroine Smilla Jasperson who grew up in Greenland and developed an unparalleled understanding of snow and ice. As an adult in Denmak she studied glacial morphology and mathematics. She could give you a lengthy lecture on SnoCones and how they interact with your tongue depending on the air temperature. Beyond examining glaciers, her talents prove handy when one of her neighbors – a boy who's all of about 8 years old named Isaiah – is found dead. He ran off the roof of their Copenhagen apartment building. Looking at the direction of the tracks and how Isaiah's feet left patterns in the snow, Smilla is convinced that it was no accident. She becomes convinced that the boy was chased off the roof. But why?

Isaiah and his mother Juliane are both Greenlandic. This resonates with Smilla as she is half Greenlandic with the other half being Danish. Clues slowly emerge. For instance, Juliane was being paid a monthly stipend by a Danish mining company because her husband had died in Greenland while on a job for it. Smilla also learns that once a month Isaiah was picked up by a stranger in a mysterious car and returned later that day. Isaiah's autopsy was done by a Professor Loyen, the director of the Institute for Arctic Medicine, instead of the usual pathologist. None of this adds up. Juliane shows Smilla the letter from the mining company announcing the stipend. There's a bit of marginalia which leads Smilla to Elsa Lubing, the company's former accountant, who proves sympathetic to Smilla's investigation despite being wrapped up in her religion. We find out about a gang of scientists who had worked for the mining company and had gone on secret missions to Greenland and who are plotting a return. Somehow Isaiah's fate is mixed up with them.

That's one half of the book. Intertwined with the mystery is Smilla. She is cold and dismissive. A misanthropic troublemaker. She grew up in Greenland with a native mother and Danish father. When her mother went out fishing one day and never came back, her father brought her back to Denmark. He's still alive and very wealthy. His wife is less than half his age. Unsurprisingly, Smilla resents him. Resents him for having taken her out of her element. The book is littered with flashbacks to Smilla's childhood in Greenland and asides which address human nature and Danish society. From the former we get a picture of a way of life that is both simpler and more complicated than that in Denmark. There are less people, less distractions, and no government bureaucracy. On the other hand, daily life is a struggle for survival. Smilla's mother was a strong and capable woman and she passed those qualities down to her daughter. Likewise Smilla gained a distrust of European culture from her mother who kept it at arms length. A pair of scissors or some thermal underwear were welcome intrusions from across the ocean but that's about it.

Any jabs that Høeg made at Denmark surely went over my head. Greenland is or was for a long time a commonwealth of Denmark. I know none of the details but racism on the part of the Danes towards Inuits or distrust the other way around is understandable. The details are lost on me but such general animosities make sense. Instead of impotently trying to understand Danish history, culture, and society, I took more note of instances where Smilla drew a distinction between Greenlandic culture vs. European. For example, she contrasts how the two deal with depression. For her, Europeans try to “work their way out of problems through action” while the Greenlandic way is to “submerge oneself in the dark mood”. Smilla feels that her native culture is more “pure” and the Inuit way of life less cluttered whereas Danes and perhaps Europeans more generally make things overly complicated by placing obstacles in the way of happiness and solutions to problems.

I was surprised (and pleasantly so) at how little Smilla changed over the course of 500 pages. She did warm up to her neighbor that she called The Mechanic to the point where she would let her guard down and indulge in the simple and necessary pleasure of human touch but she never, for lack of a better way of saying it, became a Dane. She could never accept the strange land to which her father brought her. Smilla remained a Greenlander. Perhaps this was Høeg being anti-colonial and saying that cultures shouldn't impose themselves on other cultures. On another level I just appreciated Smilla as a character who kept her anger behind a stoic facade. But I'm not sure why. It's just appeals to me – that kind of silent resistance. However, I should also add that she throws in a hefty down of physical resistance as well. I also feel that her self-righteousness gets dulled a bit as the book goes on or directed elsewhere, perhaps. It goes from being directed at the world generally to being targeted at specific evils – evils that any moral creature can point to, not merely the smug.

Høeg deftly wove a story that blended a mystery with a character study. The former was unwoven at a nice deliberate pace – he really strung me along. You don't find out the answers to all the questions until you're about 95% of the way through. The latter was intriguing as well with its flashbacks, commentary, and digressions on the nature of snow and ice. Smilla is something of an anti-hero with all of her flaws and contempt. It's hard to say if she pursued her intuition about Isaiah's death to get justice or to prove that she was right. Probably some of both.

On a related note, I watched the movie based on the book shortly after I had finished reading it and I can tell you it's for shite. Don't bother. The film gives away a sizable chunk of the mystery right at the beginning. What Høeg waited a few hundred pages to tell you what the movie gives away in the opening scene. Talk about TMI. Smilla's character isn't too bad here but most of her flashbacks are disposed with and those that remain reveal basically nothing of her internal life. She lies on a couch, thinks back to her childhood, and the audience is left on its own to figure out what it meant or what its significance is. They don't add up to character development.

As for the mystery, Høeg's slow pace is sped up and everything is condensed to the point where just about every character besides Smilla is simply Irving the Explainer. These people don't act as something to compare Smilla to. They exist simply to give her a piece of the puzzle with some characters in the film doing the work of a multiple characters in the book in a quarter of the time or less. We go from one meaningless cardboard cut out who puts a clue in our basket to the next.

Avoid the movie at all costs.

Tasting Jamaica

For a thrilling tale of a librarian threatened by a tidal wave of grease, a state worker sitting by helplessly as his buns dissolve, flesh falling off a bone just like a krokodil addict, what Dan Potacke does in his spare time, and Trish, head over to Eating in Madison A to Z. Did we survive? Follow the link now to discover the amazing conclusion to our sensational lunch out on Library Mall!

Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

Well, I took the plunge. I finally read my first Scandinavian crime thriller: Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell. It's the first book of his Wallander series which follows the exploits of Kurt Wallander, a police detective in the town of Ystad in Sweden. I had seen the movies in the Millennium series based on Stieg Larsson's books and watched a BBC documentary called Nordic Noir: The Story Of Scandinavian Crime Fiction so I knew going in that the book would be gloomy. But holy crap! Faceless Killers was one of the most depressing books I've ever read. It was the book equivalent of The Wall. Just this unrelenting journey into perdition.

It opens in the antelucan hours of a cold January day. A farmer named Nyström wakes up and thinks about how he is growing old and about his marriage. He notices that his next door neighbor's kitchen window is open and that their horse is not neighing so he wanders over to investigate. Nyström discovers Johannes Lövgren has been brutally murdered and his body mutilated. Johannes' wife Maria has been savagely beaten and left to die with a noose around her neck. Luckily she is still alive.

Wallander gets the call a bit after 5AM. Let's see here…he has a keen interest in the bottle, is divorced, estranged from his daughter, and his father is a crotchety old bastard with whom he barely gets along. The folks in Abba always seemed nice and cheerful but now I have to wonder if they were like this too once the cameras were off. I got about 3 chapters in and worried for Sweden because Mankell populates the southern coast with people who are depressed and/or alcoholics.

The investigation begins. We are introduced to Wallander's fellow officers. There's the obligatory rookie along with more grizzled veterans like our hero including Rydberg who battles rheumatism and cancer as well before the book is over. See, Mankell just loves to pile on the misery. Maria was unconscious when she arrived at the hospital and she is awake just long enough to mutter “Foreigner” before she kicks off.

This emphasizes and brings into the investigation the whole issue of immigration in Sweden which is a theme here. I know nothing about Sweden's immigration issues but here there are camps of immigrants scattered across the landscape where those seeking asylum are housed in fairly primitive conditions until the proper government officials get around to doing the paperwork. These camps house a mix of Africans and Eastern Europeans looking to start anew and, in Mankell's world at least, there are many blonde-haired, pale-skinned natives who aren't too keen on welcoming foreigners. And so, not only do the police have a brace of grisly murders on their plate, they also have xenophobic racists to contend with as well.

The story kind of bounces around amongst the immigration/racism theme, Wallander's less than optimal personal life and psyche, and the investigation of the Lövgren murders. The last of these is notable because, instead of a series of clues giving us a more or less direct path to the identity of the killer(s), we get a series of dead ends. It seems only appropriate considering that Wallander's life is much the same. While Mankell is keen to pile the personal troubles up, he at least had the graciousness to give the reader a modicum of relief towards the end of the book. I mean, he's got another 10 sequels after this so his character can't go over the edge. Too far, anyway.

I am ambivalent about Faceless Killers. On the plus side, it's a good yarn. As a police procedural/murder mystery it works well. I didn't feel disappointed that the leads Wallander followed end up at cul-de-sacs. But Wallander himself is pretty one dimensional. While there are certainly times when the sun appears from behind the clouds, those clouds are dark indeed. The whole depressed and alienated alcoholic thing got tiresome at times. Perhaps he gets developed as the series goes on. But I'll give Mankell credit. Wallander may be a one note character for most of the book but he's still oddly sympathetic. I didn't dislike Wallander, I just wished that Mankell had filled him out more.

Honestly, I'm in no hurry to read the second book in the series but I suppose I'll get around to it someday. And I'm going to read it in the summer. If Faceless Killers is any indication of how this genre works, then I'll certainly read more of it when the air is hot and humid outside. It is really nice to let stories that take place in areas with snow and cold temperatures take me away from heat and humidity.

This Is Just Weird

"Rebels searching Gadhafi's Tripoli compound find a photo album with Condoleezza Rice pictures".

I think Steve Earle had a song about this.

House of Brews to Debut at Malt House

House of Brews, Madison latest brewery and first Community Supported Brewery, will be having a release party for Page's first beer:

Relase party for the Rye (the first batch brewed) Thursday, Sept. 1st, 5-10 p.m. The Malt House

I presume this is his rye Kölsch. I can attest to its tastiness having had it at his house a few times. (Lots and lots of times if you go by number of glasses.)

Be there or be a rhombus!

EDIT: D'oh! More here.

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

Ooh! This looks good. A bit like Brotherhood of the Wolf or perhaps The Name of the Rose with karate. Odds of coming to Madison: 8-1. Against.

Latin: "I'm not dead yet!"

As a former Latin student it was neat to see this article up at Slate in which the author describes a spoken-Latin summer course he took in Rome. I also learned that one Friar Reginald Foster, a.k.a. - Reginaldus, offers classes in spoken Latin over in Milwaukee over the summer.

Shortly after reading that, I find out that a growing number of Madison-area Catholics are pushing for Latin masses. My high school Latin teach just excoriated the Second Vatican Council for allowing mass in the vernacular. Didn't Joseph Campbell rail against it as well? Use of the local language took the mystery out of it. The article also notes "Priests began facing the people instead of the altar" and I believe Campbell also took issue with this. The priest became of the focus of the proceedings instead of the communal pursuit of transcendence. Or something like that.

Vivat Latinitas!

Lagers comin' out to get you. Ooh yeah!

The Chicago Tribune ran an article a couple months ago entitled "Lagers finding way in an ale world". It gives a brief overview of how microbrewers are delving into the style which I approve of heartily.

If you've enjoyed a craft beer lately, it probably wasn't a lager.

The craft pendulum, however, is swinging back. Many major brewers — such as Bell's, Dogfish Head, Lagunitas, Avery and Victory — have at least one lager in their portfolio. Chicago's Metropolitan Brewing makes primarily crisp, brilliantly executed lagers.

Then there are Coney Island beers. Sensing a hole in the craft lager market, Jeremy Cowan — who had previously launched He'Brew Jewish-themed ales ("The chosen beer") — started a line of robust lagers four years ago.

Those Coney Island brews sound tasty. Mermaid Pilsner is made with rye while Albino Python is sort of a take on the Belgian wit with its use of orange peel along with ginger and fennel. I believe they distribute here in Madison. And it's nice to see Metropolitan get press because I like their brews. Unfortunately they don't bottle any of their more experimental beers such as the coriander-orange peel Kölsch or the rye doppelbock.

There's one bit here that I think is misleading:

Cowan's lagers would probably appall 16th century Germans — who clung to a mere four ingredients, water, barley, yeast and hops — with recipes that include up to eight malts, 10 hops and ingredients like ginger and orange peel.

There wasn't a country called "Germany" in the 16th century like there is today ergo the (in)famous purity law didn't apply to all brewers in the area we think of as being Germany these days. The Reinheitsgebot applied to Bavaria so most brewers up north had no misgivings about brewing beer with something other than water, barley, yeast and hops. Here's a list of extinct German styles catalogued from a book dating to 1784 along with some styles delineated in 1900. Fruit beers, herb beers, sour beers – not all German brewers were clinging to four ingredients.

Regardless of this little oversimplification, it's nice to see not only that more people are brewing lagers, but that they are tweaking and playing with tradition as well.

If You've Ever Wanted to Remake Kagemusha, Here's Your Chance

The rights to remake pretty much any film Akira Kurasawa ever made or planned to make are for sale.

The horror...the horror...

A new-ish company called Splendent Media is now repping the remake rights for dozens of Akira Kurosawa films. The company holds sixty-nine titles all told: 26 are films Kurosawa directed; 24 are films he wrote; and 19 are scripts he penned that were never produced.

Variety says that most of the major films Kurosawa directed are included in this deal. That includes Rashomon (already essentially remade several times over); Ran; Yojimo (already remade as A Fistful of Dollars); Dreams and Kagemusha.

There are four films not included in this deal — Seven Samurai, High and Low, Ikiru and Drunken Angel — but don’t worry! Those are already in development as remakes.

The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner

Robert Heilbroner and I got off on the wrong foot when I began reading his The Worldly Philosophers because he disses the Middle Ages. This is a hanging offense in my book. What he says is that Adam Smith was the first economist. It really needn't have been him but humanity had to wait until the Enlightenment for its first economist because there just couldn't be one in the Middle Ages. Sure, it had markets but no market system. The age was bogged down by tradition and the capriciousness of authority which stifled innovation and standardization.

His argument has much merit. Medieval guilds were out to ensure prosperity for its members, not to necessarily advance the trade. The Church took a very dim view of usury. Government authorities could and did interfere with commerce in ways that make no sense to us now. Heilbroner gives us examples such as a German merchant who returned from a business trip complaining of having to pay a custom toll every 10 miles and encountering no less than 80 different standards for measuring weight. And then there's the time in 17th century France when tailors began making buttons out of cloth which pissed off the button makers guild to no end and eventually it lobbied to have the force of law brought down on those who would dare make a cloth button or wear clothing with them.

While I'm no expert on medieval economics and I take Heilbroner's point here, I still think he gives the Middle Ages short shrift and paints people of that time as being more ignorant than they were. It's not like the denizens of the so-called Dark Ages didn't understand markets and that commerce at that time worked outside of market forces. After the Black Plague went into remission in the early 1350s, what happened was what any good free marketeer would expect. With 50%+ of the population having been wiped out, there was a big labor shortage and wages skyrocketed. And for the same reason land prices dropped like rock.

The landed aristocracy often didn't react too kindly to their overhead going up. In England you got the Statute of Labourers in 1351 which said that wages had to go back to pre-Plague levels. Others decided to go all retro and bring back serfdom which had been on the wane. Labor costs eating into your profits? Tie those peasants to the land and get your work done nearly free. Yeah, these are distortions of the market but I don't think that the people back then were ignorant of the underlying principles of supply and demand. And not just for labor and land. Goods were the same way. Saffron is expensive now but it was egregiously so back then. Demand was high as it was popular in cooking and for herbal remedies but it had to be imported. Ergo the stuff was really expensive. This is also one of main reasons we get the Age of Exploration. Europeans got tired of Arab middlemen and wanted direct access to markets.

Heibroner portrays the medieval merchant as being like a hen-pecked husband. There he is out committing commerce yet everywhere he turns there's a guild, a priest, or a government official putting the kibosh on his plans for no good reason. I understand what Heilbroner is getting at but I don't understand why there were no medieval economists, if indeed that was the case. Whatever the Church preached or the guilds did wouldn't have prevented a guy in the 1350s from noticing, “Gee, now that half the men in my region have died because of the Great Mortality, the few who are left can really demand a premium for their labors.” Sure, there was a lot of interference in commerce and the markets in the Middle Ages but, until I see proof to the contrary, I have to believe that medieval people understood simple ideas such as competition in a market and how supply and demand regulates prices.

In the chapter on Adam Smith Heilbroner says of the man “To see that labor, not nature was the source of 'value,' was one of Smith's greatest insights.” Yet this seems to run against something I learned when I read Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans. In that book Chang notes how Tudor monarchs instituted a regimen of government intervention to transform England's wool industry from one that exported the raw stuff to one that manufactured woolen products. He noted, “Britain exported its raw wool and made a reasonable profit. But those foreigners who knew how to convert the wool into clothes were generating much greater profits. It is a law of competition that people who can do difficult things which others cannot will earn more profit. This is the situation that Henry VII wanted to change in the late 15th century.” It sure seems to me that Henry understood very well that labor was the “source of value”.





OK, gripes about the Middle Ages aside, The Worldly Philosophers was a great read. It was written with a scholarly tone but for the intellectually curious layreader. (And there are some light-hearted moments as well.) I got the feeling while reading it that Heilbroner, who was an economics professor, just had the biggest blast writing it. But I can't put my finger on why I feel this way exactly. The book profiles several of the greatest economic thinkers that the West has produced so the author is writing about the subject to which he has dedicated himself. Not only that, Heilbroner examines men whose ideas made them visionaries. They weren't just sitting around demonstrating how interest rates affect the price of women's underwear by using calculus, they were laying out grand schemes and attempting to show how economics can shed light on human society and existence. These guys had big, bold views and there's just something about the book's style which leads me to believe that Heilbroner was not only interested in the topic himself, but that he got great satisfaction in trying to get others interested as well.

Heilbroner gives us background on each thinker before explaining what they contributed to economics. (There's also a chapter devoted to socialist utopians of the 19th century.) He doesn't try to explain every nuance of a given man's ideas and instead goes for a greatest hits kind of thing. The main theories are served up alone to keep things simple.

Aside from the individual economic theories, there were a couple of things which really stood out for me.

First is that, once the ideas of some of these guys left the academy, they sure got mangled in the popular imagination.

Smith tends to be thought of as the guy who famously denied the existence of benevolent butchers, brewers, and bakers and thought that government should just get out of the way of the Invisible Hand, but he also wrote "No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable." He favored public education and was an optimist. Smith felt that, if government gets out of the way and lets the market do its thing, everyone would benefit.

The terms "Marxism" and "Marxist" are fightin' words these days but I suspect that 99% of the people who use these terms know little about the man and his ideas. He wrote a lot about how capitalism has within itself the seeds of its own destruction: it produces goods with no good plan so you have economic slumps and depressions which would embitter and motivate the proletariat to move beyond it. The thing is, Marx never really articulated what a post-capitalist society would be like in much detail. As Heilbroner says, "Das Kapital is the Doomsday Book of capitalism, and in all of Marx there is almost nothing that looks beyond the Day of Judgment to see what the future might be like." Well, harrumph. Lenin was winging it the whole time.

I'll also mention John Maynard Keynes. With the Tea Baggers in ascendancy, Keynes' ideas are nearly tantamount to communism these days. But he was all about, Heilbroner's words, the government "lending a helping hand". For instance, Keynes wrote a letter in 1934 asking "How soon will normal business enterprise come to the rescue? On what scale, by which expedients, and for how long is abnormal government expenditure advisable in the meantime?" Government spending to get the economy going was "abnormal" while business enterprise was "normal".

The other thing which occurred to me was just how contingent some of the economic theories of the gentlemen profiled in the book are. Prior to reading the book I tended to think of economic theory as being composed of laws that were more or less universal. I thought that Adam Smith was venerated because he had sussed out the laws of markets which were applicable throughout time and space. Well, yes and no. Furthermore it was interesting to learn about how these men formulated their ideas. They were certainly inspired by their times.

Take Adam Smith. He wrote at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and saw things moving upwards and onwards – an ever-rising tide which would continually lift all boats. As Heilbroner points out, though, he didn't foresee "the ugly factory system", how ginormous corporations would disrupt the market system, and the great social changes that the Industrial Revolution would bring about. Look at the milieu when Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto: riots in Berlin, Italy, Prague, Paris, and Vienna; the kings of France and Belgium forced to flee. Everywhere he could hear the sound of marching, charging proletarian feet. Yet capitalism was more flexible than Marx thought. Plus, in America, it was allowed to develop in an environment that lacked the traditional European class distinctions. Thorstein Veblen hailed from right here in Wisconsin. Witnessing the Guilded Age of robber barons, is there any wonder he wrote about "conspicuous consumption"?

Lastly I'll note that the chapter on Keynes was especially good reading because of how his times mirror our own. He wrote during the Great Depression and we're in a recession. If you read the likes of Paul Krugman, you've heard people advocating Keynesian spending programs. So why would there be a need for them? Heilbroner lays it out simply. Prior to Keynes, the running theory was that, when the economy goes south, people will start to save. A glut of savings will drive interest rates down because of supply and demand. There's a lot of money to lend so rates will be low. And with low interest rates businesses will have incentive to invest. Keynes figured out the obvious: there would be no savings. As Heilbroner asks "How could a community be expected to save as much when everyone was hard up as when everyone was prosperous?"

The Worldly Philosophers doesn't give the reader a thorough lesson in economics. It doesn't even give the reader a thorough lesson in the economists it profiles. But it tells a great story. You get the big picture of the dismal science dotted with some detail. Plus some of these guys were more than a little eccentric which adds a bit of levity to the tale.

UW Geneticist Co-Discovers Ancestral Home of Lager Yeast

You just knew a Cheesehead would be in the thick of things when it came to lager yeast research.

How did lager beer come to be? After pondering the question for decades, scientists have found that an elusive species of yeast isolated in the forests of Argentina was key to the invention of the crisp-tasting German beer 600 years ago.

It took a five-year search around the world before a scientific team discovered, identified and named the organism, a species of wild yeast called Saccharomyces eubayanus that lives on beech trees.

"We knew it had to be out there somewhere," said Chris Todd Hittinger, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a coauthor of the report published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

Cyber-Burlesque

There's just something wrong about pairing a Cyberman with burlesque as they are doing with Geekesque Burlesque. They're evil and scary and they like to convert people into machines. But I guess I could handle it if Sable Sin Cyr donned a sexy Cyber Leader outfit, tied me up, and intoned "To struggle is futile" while she used a Cybermat for purposes never intended by its creator.

Ahem.