Trickeration III

Oh, good. Holzie wrote up the party, so I don't have to (I could barely think where to start). Heather and I took Erik along and only managed to hang for a couple-few hours, but man was it fun.

There were some great costumes (and yes, naked girls with body paint == "great costumes", but nothing beats the Donnie Darko bunny hanging out with the Noid), good music, and something like a million people there (which makes it surprising that I enjoyed it so much).

There's a profile for the party on Match.com and there was supposed to be someone from DenverMix.com there taking pictures, but I'm not sure about that.

CL350 -- Rear Tire: Sorted

Yesterday evening, instead of handing out candy to children, I went over to Erik's so we could try to change the rear tire. I had ordered some riduculously cheap (but reportedly perfectly acceptable, quality-wise) Chinese tires, which arrived early last week. Between then and now we've had far more pressing things to do after work and over the weekend, so this is our firt time to give it a shot. I'd be lying if I said we weren't a little worried. We had replaced the tube in the old front tire back when we first got started, and it was an unholy mess. Worst part about the whole ordeal was the slow leak went ended up with.

So this time we were working with fresh rubber instead of 30-year-old crusty tires. We had also been tipped to use some soapy water or something to lube the bead a bit and help it get over the rim. That worked like a treat, let me tell you!

So now we've got a new patch of rubber on the rear. The front is next.

Good While It Lasted

This just in: The Red Sox are fucked. Here's to another 80-odd years without a World Series Championship.

Update: Well, Theo can always go work for the Brockton Rox!

"We don't actually have an office for Theo," Rox president Jim Lucas said. "But we built two new cubicles this year and he'd have his own phone and access to the internet."

After all, Brockton is the City of Champions. (After only a couple years, though, I don't think the Rox contribute to that reputation.)

La Fee Verte

Damn Matt to hell. He sent me this link and any adverse consequence is entirely his to bear... I have long been a sucker for the mystique built up around absinthe. Anything that might have contributed to Van Gogh lopping of his ear can't be all bad, right? Right? Well, you know what I'm getting at. Plus, I like anise/liquorice flavors, so I bet I'd dig it.

So then comes this: The Mystery of the Green Menace

So Breaux decided to make some himself. He found a French-language history book with "pre-ban protocols," a vague description of how absinthe was made back before it was outlawed. Armed with the protocols, he prepared a batch in the lab. The result? "Not very good," he concedes. "I couldn't imagine that being the most popular liqueur in France."

He got his chance to taste the real thing in 1996, when a friend spotted a bottle marked "old French liquor" at an estate sale. They were asking $300, and Breaux, seeing it was a vintage Spanish Pernod Tarragona absinthe, immediately wrote a check. When he got it to his lab, he plunged a syringe through the cork, extracted one precious sip, and downed it. "It had a honeyed texture, distinct herbal and floral notes, and a gentle roundness uncharacteristic of such a strong liquor," he says. "Those protocols were crap."

So, Ted Breaux used his gas chromatography-mass spectrometer to analyze some old, pre-ban absinthe and has figured how to distill something approaching the real thing. (Breaux calls the stuff you can get in the Czech Republic, etc. these days "mouthwash and vodka in a bottle, with some aromatherapy oil.")

"It's like an herbal speedball," he says. "Some of the compounds are excitatory, some are sedative. That's the real reason artists liked it. Drink two or three glasses and you can feel the effects of the alcohol, but your mind stays clear - you can still work."

Breaux has hooked up with a distiller in France and you can order his goods online -- shipped via courier -- for around $150 a bottle. Yikes. I don't even spend that kind of scratch on Scotch, and I know I like Scotch.

But I am sorely tempted...

Damn you, Matt.

Aryan Olsens?

As many of you must know by now, one of my personal watch items is racism and hate groups/crimes - particularly as manifested in the white power movement and its various incarnations. Given that, you can probably guess how I reacted when I saw Matt's link to this article: Young Singers Spread Racist Hate

Known as "Prussian Blue" — a nod to their German heritage and bright blue eyes — the girls from Bakersfield, Calif., have been performing songs about white nationalism before all-white crowds since they were nine.

"We're proud of being white, we want to keep being white," said Lynx. "We want our people to stay white … we don't want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race."

Holy shit! Daddy brands his cattle with swastikas, y'all! And of course, they are free to say whatever they want here in the USofA... but WOW!

I see it like this: I consider it animal abuse to train a dog to be aggressive -- eventually that dog is going to cause severe damage to something or someone and have to be destroyed. By training the dog to attack, you are basically killing the dog (nevermind whatever gets mauled by it). On the same side of the same coin, I also consider it dangerous psychological abuse to raise children to hate other people based on superficial judgments. That applies to everyone -- any religious zealots, any nationalist xenophobes, etc. -- not just some swastika swinging cowboy in the California wastelands breeding Aryan pop stars who seem just a likely to end up in a trailer strung out on meth in ten years as to do anything worthwhile with their lives. (So why do I say that? I say it because hate thrives in isolation -- these girls' parents already want to move to an "all-white community in the Pacific Northwest" because Bakersfield, CA isn't white enough. So, yeah, it's easy for me to imagine these girls getting home schooled in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere until they get married off to a couple of prison tattooed crankheads. Am I prejudging them the same way they prejudge people of color? Do they deserve it? Do my preconceived notions have any more factual basis than theirs? Is it right to hate hate?)

Hate ruins people, and there's no excuse for teaching it. I don't care how precious you hold the First Amendment.

More Tattoo Stuff

Highlights from Needled (which anyone with any interest in skin+ink should read daily):

  • To Die For Clothing -- T-shirts and other fun kit with designs by actual tattoo artists.
  • BellaVendetta.com [NOT SAFE FOR WORK] -- BellaVendetta seems sort of like SuicideGirls, except with more of a fetish angle ("Every shoot I do is like an entire art project. Today, we will be exploring zombie clown porn. Every aspect of it is an art." - The italics are mine.), male models ("I want to get many more boys. It's funny because pornography is such a male dominated business, yet, I have the hardest time getting boys naked. They're all so self conscious."), and perhaps less drama.
  • The World of Tattoo -- An encyclopedic book on tattoo. Apparently filled with trivia like: Catherine The Great had incredibly obscene tattoos, which she believed increased her sexual attractiveness.
  • Inked Magazine -- A glossy tattoo magazine? I got my subscription. Did you?
  • Coast Guard tightens rules on tattoos -- One of the guys in my motorcycle class was an Air Force recruiter. He told me I could still get into officer training at my age with my Aerospace Engineering degree and technical career background. He said the ink would be a problem, though. I told him no worries. ;)

Katrina Tattoos

In Katrina's wake, a tattoo boom in New Orleans

Tattoo artists report a surge in demand for designs that celebrate New Orleans: fleur-de-lis patterns, "NOLA," after the city's widely known abbreviation, and even a symbol modeled after the weather-map depiction of hurricanes.

Between returning residents, construction workers pouring into the battered city and the National Guard troops preparing to pack up and head home, demand has been brisk.

It is interesting that tattoos have become mainstream enough for just about anyone who lives through a significant event (9-11, Katrina, etc.) will at some point think to themselves "I should get a tattoo to commemorate this." Heck, there are firefighters that have never set foot in New York who have gotten FDNY memorial/tribute ink just because of the "brotherhood" in the job.

I think that's great.

It Is You (Oh, yeah...)

I'm totally and completely stuck right now. I have listened to the Specials' version of the song "Pressure Drop" (also features on the Gross Pointe Blank soundtrack) over a dozen times in the past two days (plus the Toots and the Maytals version a few times for good measure).

This isn't entirely unheard of for me -- last time it happened, though, it was the entire American Idiot album.

I'm not entirely sure what brought this on, but the song makes me borderline ecstatic. (Comment about my questionable sanity redacted.)

At any rate, bless the Specials.

How was your weekend, Jake?

Last week ended with some work related news that I won't discuss here. Let's just say that things are in flux and the future seems murky at the moment. But then, certainty equals boredom, right? ;) Saturday was a good day. In the afternoon I headed over to Erik's to "poke a Honda" (say it out loud for the full effect) -- the CL350 was transferred back to Erik's garage when we went to Los Angeles so that he could continue to poke while I was off gallivanting in the land of swimming pools and movie stars, this explains why there have been no recent photos, as I consistently forget to take my camera when I go over there. We twiddled about for a while: getting the foot pegs fully mounted; test fitting the replacement side covers; wrestling with, cursing at, and ultimately drilling out a broken-off left-hand mirror bolt (looks like we might need to tap that now... fun.).

After that, we took out Erik's Honda XL250 (probably one of the world's most forgiving bikes) and found a big construction site with lots of flat, soft dirt. He let me bang around there for a couple hours, I'd guess. I was very comfortable on the bike even though I had my "first dump": I was riding around a ring that went over a dirt spine just to get the feel of how the bike can handle verticality, etc. when I finally decided I was done I thought I'd be super cool and drive onto the spine rather than over it. Needless to say it didn't work very well and I ended up grabbing the front brake instead of the clutch and just plopped right over. The ground was soft and I (mostly) got my leg out of the way -- no damage was done.

Sunday was spent working around the house: I mowed the lawn, cooked some chicken pesto cavatappi, downloaded some Veronica Mars torrents (Note to The Wife: This means you can watch VM on the computer! -- VM is "the new Buffy" according to my darling spouse, and yes, I enjoy it, too.), and generally farted around. Good times.

The Honda CL350 Saga (A Continuation)

So last night Erik and I replaced the taillight lens and all of the "winker" lenses. Man, is it ever nice to get rid fo all that cracked plastic! We also replaced the rear/passenger footpegs with sparkly new ones and re-mounted the main footpegs and side stand (mostly -- we're missing one bolt), which required some adjusting to the shift lever and rear brake lever so that everything had proper clearance. It's really gone beyond the "hey, that thing looks like a motorcycle" stage at this point.

Next we have replacement air filters coming via eBay as well as a new (or at least "not destroyed like the one we have now") headlight bucket that Erik ordered from the (apparently) famous Sac Cycle shop.

Oh, an I finally took my first spin on the thing once we had the pegs on it. Granted, I only went maybe 20 yards down the driveway, but at least I managed to pull a U-turn without dropping the bastard (Thank goodness for those damned box turns in my motorcycle safety class, eh?). Of course, this wasn't the maiden voyage for our little Scrambler, as Erik is so at home on motorbikes he could ride the thing without footpegs. Heck, I'm not even sure he needs handlebars.

It's not all good news, though. It's beginning to look like getting a title for this thing is going to be a royal pain in the arse. For one thing, the online version of the Kelley Blue Book doesn't even think the bike exists! And that's a fairly minor detail in the entire process. As Erik told it: "I went down to the DMV and told them that I have a bike that I've rebuilt and that I need to get a title for it... And they looked at me like I was on fire."

Hockey Night


Hockey
Originally uploaded by Jake Sutton.

The end result was disappointing, but it was definitely a good time at the Avs' second home game of the season.

We had nine goals scored -- I love this new NHL! Goalies must be hating it though. The Avs had a goal called back, which was only the beginnings of ill will aimed at the refs from the crowd. Goalie David Aebischer totally lost his cool, which is completely unusual for him -- He looked like Patrick Roy out there!

Ah, good times...

------ Oh, funny story:

As we were coming into the Pepsi Center, a lady came up to me and said "Sir, I need you to step over here for a random security check. Just place your cell phone, keys, and other metal objects in this basket." So I started fumbling under my oversized Avs jersey for all my gear: I plop my phone in the basket, then my car keys, and then I wrestle with my chain wallet while The Wife makes fun of me for being so heavily accessorized. Once I finally tossed that into her basket, the lady gives me a quick once-over with the metal detecting wand and sends me on my way.

(I know, not so funny, really. Wait for it...)

After we got home, I was disassembling myself to get changed into my jammies: plug the phone into it's charger, wrap the chain around the wallet and put it on the nightstand, take out my knife and place it on the nightstand ... *blink-blink* Well, huh! Partly I felt stupid because I totally thought to disarm myself before we left and then promptly forgot, but mostly I worry about the lax security at the hockey game. ;)