Cave of the Mounds

Entering the Cave

Enter­ing the Cave

Over labor day week­end, my dad drove up to Wis­con­sin for a visit. Among other things, we hit the farm­ers’ mar­ket, went for a bike ride, and attempted to tour the Cap­i­tal Brew­ery (but, they were closed for a pri­vate event). But, one of the coolest things we did was a visit to the Cave of the Mounds in Blue Mounds, Wis­con­sin. The cave, which has no nat­ural open­ings of sig­nif­i­cant size, was dis­cov­ered in 1939 dur­ing a lime­stone quar­ry­ing oper­a­tion. Quar­ry­ing was halted, the cave was quickly devel­oped, and pub­lic tours began the fol­low­ing year. Though not a huge cave, the tour took about an hour. High­lights included a six-foot long cephalo­pod fos­sil in the cave’s ceil­ing and some inter­est­ing mul­ti­col­ored cave for­ma­tions.

Purple Asters with Bugs

Pur­ple Asters with Bugs

Cave of the Mounds also offers a cou­ple of short above-ground trails, which we walked after emerg­ing from the cav­ern. The trails offered myr­iad beau­ti­ful plant life, lots of insects and spi­ders, and not a few birds. I wasn’t able to get any decent bird pic­tures, but I did get a few good flower and bug pho­tos. Veron­ica gets the buf-spotting prize for the day; she found a katy­did blend­ing in with leaves, a cou­ple of siz­able grasshop­pers, and a bunch of daddy-long legs, all of which seemed quite con­tent to stay put long enough to be pho­tographed. Click here to see all of my above and below-ground pho­tos from Cave of the Mounds.

Also, here are some of my pre­vi­ous wild cav­ing pic­tures taken in Ten­nessee caves: Camp’s Gulf Cave, Indian Grave Point Cave, Cave of the Skulls, and Christ­mas Cave.

Sock

Sock
By Penn Jil­lette
St. Martin’s Grif­fin, 2004
World­CatRead OnlineLibrary­ThingGoogle BooksUW-Madison

Sock is, at its heart, a mys­tery novel; a woman is mur­dered and the pro­tag­o­nist, a police­man, sets out to find her killer. But, as one might expect from the self-described “larger, louder half” of Penn & Teller, this is far from your stan­dard detec­tive novel. The story is nar­rated by Dickie, the main character’s sock mon­key. Dickie’s owner, who we only know as ‘the Lit­tle Fool’ for most of the book, is a cop, but he’s not a detec­tive. He’s a police diver who spends most of his time pulling bod­ies out of New York’s East River; he doesn’t nor­mally solve cases. But, when one of the bod­ies he retrieves turns out to be that of Nell, one of his ex-girlfriends, the Lit­tle Fool decides to try his hand at detec­tive work.

He has to do so in a com­pletely unof­fi­cial capac­ity, of course, and he enlists the help of Tommy, Nell’s best friend and pedi­curist. The unlikely part­ners spend all their free time try­ing to recon­struct Nell’s last days and fig­ure out who might have mur­dered her. They get a break in the form of a note from the killer. But, as the Lit­tle Fool finds the note pinned to another body he pulls out of the river, it also means that they’re deal­ing with a dan­ger­ous psy­chopath who will almost cer­tainly kill again.

Penn’s sock mon­key nar­ra­tor cer­tainly pro­vides an inter­est­ing twist, but I found Dickie’s stream-of-consciousness nar­ra­tive style to be some­what dis­tract­ing. I could get used to it after awhile, but it made for a slow start every time I picked up the book. Also, although Penn has a fairly inter­est­ing story to tell, he does it in a very vul­gar man­ner. I’m not eas­ily offended, but I found the sheer quan­tity of curs­ing and descrip­tions of sex acts to be a bit much. I read some of this book while trav­el­ing, and at times I felt the need to cover chap­ter titles so that peo­ple around me wouldn’t see them. I can’t really rec­om­mend this book; I’d say that your time would be much bet­ter spent watch­ing some of Penn & Teller’s won­der­ful magic or their in-your-face skep­tic series “Bull­shit!” on Showtime.

Devil’s Challenge

Team 701 - Musicology Mayhem

Team 701: Musi­col­ogy Mayhem

Yes­ter­day morn­ing, Veron­ica, our friend Patrick, and I par­tic­i­pated in the Devil’s Chal­lenge Triathlon at Devil’s Lake State Park, about an hour north­west of Madi­son. We entered as a relay team — I swam (quar­ter mile), Patrick biked (15 miles), and Veron­ica ran (3 miles). We decided ear­lier this sum­mer that we wanted to attempt a relay triathlon, and had been more or less train­ing since then. We took a trip to Devil’s Lake last week­end to scout out the course and to do a dry run. Still, hav­ing never done this sort of thing before, we weren’t quite sure what to expect on the actual day of the race. We left Madi­son at a quar­ter to 6 yes­ter­day morn­ing so that we’d have plenty of time to park, pickup our reg­is­tra­tion packet, and warm up before the 8 a.m. start. We got there with plenty of time to spare, and set about men­tally and phys­i­cally prepar­ing ourselves.

A Later Swim Start

A Later Swim Start

At the race, indi­vid­ual triath­letes were orga­nized into start­ing waves, largely by age and sex divi­sions. A funny thing about relay teams like ours, though: we were put in the very first wave, which is oth­er­wise reserved for elite com­peti­tors. So, you have the fast, hard­core, expe­ri­enced peo­ple grouped with peo­ple who aren’t up to doing the whole triathlon them­selves. I sup­pose this makes a cer­tain amount of sense; relay­ers are free to expend all their energy on each leg of the race, whereas indi­vid­u­als have to pace themselves.

Swimmers Exiting the Water

Swim­mers Exit­ing the Water

So, I lined up on the beach with the elite ath­letes and the other relay swim­mers. Since we were the first ones to go, all the other ath­letes and many spec­ta­tors were behind us, cheer­ing and mak­ing noise. When the starter horn went off, we all ran out into the water towards the first buoy. Not hav­ing had the chance to observe any starts, I just fol­lowed the peo­ple in front of me. The lake was very shal­low (I could have walked the whole swim course), so the deci­sion of when to switch from run­ning to swim­ming was an impor­tant one. There was a big crush get­ting around the first buoy, then the pack started to thin out some­what. Through most of the swim, I had plenty of room to maneu­ver. After round­ing the sec­ond buoy, I swam shore­wards until the water became too shal­low to get a good stroke. Once on shore, I had to run up a short flight of stairs and sprint a fair dis­tance to where Patrick was wait­ing with his bike.

Patrick Rounding the Last Curve

Patrick Round­ing the Last Curve

I made pretty good time in the water, so much so that Patrick wasn’t quite ready when I arrived. While he threw on his hel­met, I trans­ferred the neo­prene tim­ing chip anklet from my leg to his and ducked out of the tran­si­tion area to find Veron­ica and my towel. After dry­ing off and chang­ing, I grabbed my cam­era, and started shoot­ing pic­tures of other com­peti­tors. When the first cyclist came roar­ing down the final hill into the park, I wished Veron­ica good luck and set off to catch Patrick. From the spot I picked, I couldn’t see very far up the last down­hill curve. But, a cou­ple of pro pho­tog­ra­phers were stand­ing far­ther up the hill, and I used them as an early warn­ing sys­tem; when they reached for their cam­eras, I knew a cyclist was approaching.

Veronica Running

Veron­ica Running

After Patrick came tear­ing by, I went to try to catch Veron­ica at the start of her run. I didn’t get any good pics then, but I man­aged to catch her later at the fin­ish. Once she’d run across the line, we all hung out for awhile wait­ing for the results to be posted. We ended up doing pretty well for our first time out: 9th out of 38 relay teams. We were 6th in our divi­sion (co-ed relays). I beat my tar­get time (8:00) by more than a minute, Veron­ica beat her tar­get by nearly three min­utes, and Patrick came very close to his tar­get (he would’ve beaten it if his front derailleur hadn’t mal­func­tioned mid-race, leav­ing him with only his big chain ring for climb­ing hills). Our final time was 1:26:43. You can see all the results here (they put us under Veronica’s name, rather than that of our team: Musi­col­ogy May­hem). All in all, it was a lot of fun, even if we did have to wake up at 5 a.m.

Click here to see all of my pho­tos from the race. Soon, we should get a link to the pic­tures taken by the pro pho­tog­ra­phers. If there are any good ones, I’ll link to them as well.

The Chase

The Chase
By Clive Cus­sler
Put­nam Adult, 2007
World­CatLibrary­ThingGoogle BooksUW-Madison

In The Chase, Clive Cus­sler for the first time strays from his usual nau­ti­cal focus (although the book’s open­ing scene does take place on a sal­vage boat) and his inter­wo­ven casts of exist­ing char­ac­ters. His new pro­tag­o­nist, Isaac Bell, does take seom cues from the Dirk Pitt/Kurt Austin mold, but he also seems to take some inspi­ra­tion from James West (of The Wild Wild West as well. Bell is a young man from a wealthy fam­ily who, just after the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, is the best detec­tive at the pri­vate Van Dorn agency (mod­elled after the Pinker­ton National Detec­tive Agency.

Bell is called to Den­ver to help in the inves­ti­ga­tion of a par­tic­u­larly bru­tal bank rob­ber known only as the Butcher Ban­dit. The Ban­dit hits banks when they have large amounts of cash on hand, kills all wit­nesses, and always man­ages to dis­ap­pear com­pletely. Bell and his fel­low Van Dorn agents hunt the Butcher Ban­dit and his beau­ti­ful accom­plice through­out the west­ern U.S., involv­ing a train vs. car race through Cal­i­for­nia and cul­mi­nat­ing in a steam loco­mo­tive chase over the Sier­ras, through Nevada and Idaho, and into Montana.

I enjoyed this book more than Cussler’s last few nov­els. It’s fresh sub­ject mat­ter for him, and The Chase has no co-author. I hope that he’ll Write more Isaac Bell nov­els and that he’ll do them him­self, rather than farm­ing them out to his grow­ing sta­ble of collaborators.

San Francisco

Golden Gate Bridge

Golden Gate Bridge

The week before last, I headed out west to visit my mom in Nevada. We spent one day at Lake Tahoe, swim­ming, sun­ning, and Shake­speare­ing. We saw Much Ado About Noth­ing, which was far bet­ter than last year’s A Mid­sum­mer Night’s Dream. The next day, we drove to Napa (by way of Fry’s Elec­tron­ics) to visit friends Mark and Dawn. We weren’t there long enough to actu­ally tour any winer­ies, but we did take a scenic drive through the vineyards.

Most of our time, though, was spent in the Bay Area. We again stayed with friends David and Francesca (and their daugh­ter Maria) in Oak­land. Our intent was to have a relax­ing visit, so we spent quite a bit of our time there just hang­ing out and doing some shop­ping in Berke­ley. I made a pil­grim­age to the orig­i­nal Peet’s on Vine, and picked up a good sup­ply of Moli­nari salame — one of my favorite foods in the world — at Gen­ova Del­i­catessen. I also made a trip to Forrest’s for a bas­soon pickup (more on that soon).

Sphinx Outside the de Young

Sphinx Out­side the de Young

My mom and I only went across the bay to San Fran­cisco on one day, but we squeezed in quite a bit. We started off at the de Young Museum to see the trav­el­ing King Tut exhibit. We got there early, and man­aged to see much of it before the crowds arrived. The exhibit included many arti­facts asso­ci­ated with Tutankhamun’s prob­a­ble ances­tors (his pre­cise lin­eage is uncer­tain), as well as those from the tomb of the boy king him­self. Unfor­tu­nately the most famous Tut arti­fact, his gold funeral mask, no longer trav­els out­side Egypt. But there was cer­tainly no short­age of other breath­tak­ingly beau­ti­ful objects to see.

Golden Gate Park Band

Golden Gate Park Band

We spent about an hour and a half work­ing our way through the exhibit, then spent some time else­where in Golden Gate Park. We took a stroll through the Japan­ese tea gar­den, although since we’d just stopped at the de Young’s cafe, we didn’t actu­ally have tea. Then, we walked over to the Tem­ple of Music, where the Golden Gate Park Band was set­ting up for an after­noon con­cert. That afternoon’s con­cert con­sisted of all Broad­way tunes, and we stuck around and lis­tened for a lit­tle while.

Kiteboarder Under the Bridge

Kite­boarder Under the Bridge

We’d brought a pic­nic lunch with us, and we drove out to the beach to eat it. It was over­cast and hazy, but still nice to sit on the sand and enjoy the sea breeze dur­ing our meal. After lunch, we headed over to the Golden Gate Bridge. We parked at bridge level and walked down a steep path to the water­front near Fort Point. The clouds were low enough to obscure the tops of the bridge’s tow­ers, which made for some dra­matic photo oppor­tu­ni­ties. Many sail­ing craft of all sorts were out on the bay that day, tak­ing advan­tage of the brisk wind. We spot­ted a group of kite board­ers zoom­ing across the water. A cou­ple of the more dar­ing ones were play­ing under the bridge and even beyond it in the open ocean.

As usual, click the pho­tos above for larger ver­sions, or check out the whole gallery here. The gallery con­tains a panorama of the city across the bay I stitched together from five or six sep­a­rate pic­tures. The ver­sion in the gallery isn’t very big, though. Here’s a much larger ver­sion.

Fool

By Moore, Christo­pher
William Mor­row, 2009
World­CatLibrary­ThingGoogle BooksUW-Madison

Fool is Christo­pher Moore’s retelling of King Lear, told from the per­spec­tive of — who else — Lear’s court jester. The jester, who Moore names Pocket, may be a fool by trade, but he is cer­tainly no dunce. He has free run of the cas­tle, friends in both high and low places, and with Lear’s pro­tec­tion is free to make fun of who­ever he wants. He is also very close to Lear’s daugh­ters Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia. Pocket is most loyal to Lear and Cordelia, and through­out Moore’s take on the tale, it is his behind-the-scenes schem­ing that serves to pro­tect their inter­ests and lives.

Fool opens with a tongue-in-cheek warn­ing from Moore that “This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gra­tu­itous shag­ging, mur­der, spank­ing, maim­ing, trea­son, and hereto­fore unex­plored heights of vul­gar­ity and pro­fan­ity…” In other words, Shake­speare prob­a­bly would’ve loved it. Moore acknowl­edges that tak­ing on one of the most famous plays by the best known Eng­lish writer of all time was a daunt­ing task. But, then again, this is from the same man who wrote a novel about the lost years in the life of Jesus (and his best friend Biff). He retains basi­cally all of Lear’s com­plex plot, although he of course makes Pocket and his machi­na­tions more inte­gral to that plot. The end­ing is dif­fer­ent, though — you can’t have a comic novel with a truly tragic fin­ish. Moore also brings in dia­log and char­ac­ters from other of the Bard’s plays, most notably the trio of witches from Mac­beth.

I’ve read all of Christo­pher Moore’s nov­els, and I think that Fool is one of his best. I read most of the book dur­ing a stint in a pit orches­tra (coin­ci­den­tally for a pro­duc­tion of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Yeomen of the Guard, which also fea­tures a jester), and I had to be very care­ful not to laugh out loud at inop­por­tune moments. A famil­iar­ity with King Lear is help­ful but by no means a require­ment for read­ing Fool; read­ing the syn­op­sis on Wikipedia is prob­a­bly suf­fi­cient prepa­ra­tion. I can’t rec­om­mend Moore’s writ­ing highly enough, for those read­ers who enjoy a twisted sense of humor. Start with Fool, Lamb, or Blood­suck­ing Fiends: A Love Story, then check out some of his other novels.

Flute and Harpsichord Sonatas?

A cou­ple of weeks ago, I picked up this album. Can you spot what’s wrong with the cover?

LP Cover

Click for a larger version

Bonus points if you can find the sec­ond thing wrong with the pic­ture. West­min­ster Gold strikes again…

The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie

The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie
By
Broad­way, 2000
World­CatLibrary­ThingGoogle BooksUW-Madison

Long cloth ties are today found through­out the world around men’s necks (and some­times those of women as well). Other types of neck­wear are of course worn for cer­tain occa­sions (bow ties with tuxe­dos) or in cer­tain regions (string or bolo ties in the Amer­i­can South­west), but none matches the long tie in its ubiquity.

But, if you ask most any tie-wearing man (includ­ing me) how many dif­fer­ent tie knots they use, the answer will be “one.” Usu­ally that one knot is the four-in-hand, and a fair num­ber of peo­ple are aware of the exis­tence of another knot or two: the Wind­sor or half-Windsor, although these are­ich less com­monly used.

Surely, though, there are more than three ways to tie a tie. Thomas Fink and Yong Mao, two Cam­bridge the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cists, decided, appar­ently on a whim, to devote their con­sid­er­able tal­ents to dis­cov­er­ing all the pos­si­ble (an prac­ti­cal) tie knots. Once they real­ized that tie knots are “equiv­a­lent to per­sis­tant ran­dom walks on a tri­an­gu­lar lat­tice” (an obser­va­tion that Is evi­dently a rather sim­ple leap for a pair of physi­cists), it was a sim­ple mat­ter to math­e­mat­i­cally derive 85 dif­fer­ent ways to tie a tie.

Fink and Mao begin their book with a short his­tory of men’s neck­wear. The ear­li­est exam­ples of knot­ted neck cloths they cite are those adorn­ing the 7500 ter­ra­cotta sol­diers found in the tomb of China’s first emperor. Other early exam­ples come from Rome in the sec­ond cen­tury A.D., but dec­o­ra­tive men’s neck cloths seem not to have really caught on until the sev­en­teenth cen­tury. From that point until the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury (when long ties became de rigeur) a suc­ces­sion of neck cloth styles devel­oped in Europe: cra­vats, stocks, bow ties, Ascots, etc.

A sec­ond intro­duc­tory chap­ter is devoted to knots and knot the­ory. The authors pro­vide a basic overview of the tech­ni­cal aspects of knots and knot tying and of his­tor­i­cal attempts to ennu­mer­ate and cat­e­go­rize knots. They then explain in detail their own the­ory of tie knots. They lay out both the tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tions of tie knots (the tie must pass around the neck, and all knots must be ter­mi­nated such that the two ends hang down­wards) as well as the aes­thetic con­sid­er­a­tions (size, shape, sym­me­try, and balance).

The third chap­ter forms the meat of the book. In it, Fink and Mao ennu­mer­ate their 85 knots, orga­nized by the num­ber of moves it takes to com­plete each one. Each knot is accom­pa­nied by a step-by-step tying dia­gram and notes about how it relates to other knots, when appro­pri­ate. The thir­teen knits that the authors deem most aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing are dis­cussed at greater length, and are illus­trated with pho­tographs of well-known men sport­ing them. Among this sub­set of knots are, of course, the famil­iar four-in-hand, Wind­sor, and half-Windsor.

The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie is a delight­fully whim­si­cal lit­tle book, quin­tes­sen­tially British in it’s sub­ject mat­ter, tone, and humor. The authors man­age to explain what turns out to be a sur­pris­ingly com­plex prob­lem in a way that’s pretty easy to under­stand. For those read­ers who desire a more pre­cise expla­na­tion, Fink and Mao sup­ply am appen­dix chock full of for­mu­las and deriv­a­tives. The book con­tains plenty of pho­tographs, illus­tra­tions, and dia­grams, which are quite help­ful in under­stand­ing the his­tory, knot the­ory, and all the knot variations.

This book is less than ten years old, but it us already out of print and used copies go for fifty dol­lars or more. I got my hands on a copy via Inter­li­brary Loan. But, if you’d just like a quick overview and a list of all 85 knots with direc­tions, Thomas Fink pro­vides them on his web site.

All Red Potatoes

Red Potatoes

Red!

Among the items in our first CSA box was a mixed bag of pota­toes with skins rang­ing in color from light brown to red. The list that accom­pa­nied our sec­ond box included the line “All Red Pota­toes,” and we assumed that sim­ply meant that we’d got­ten all red-skinned ones that time. Imag­ine our sur­prise when we quar­tered a few of these pota­toes to boil and dis­cov­ered that they’re red all the way through! And what’s more, the color doesn’t fade dur­ing boil­ing (like the gor­geous deep laven­der skin of the Pur­ple Viking potato); if any­thing, it becomes more intense.

Cabbage Leaf with Stuffing

Cab­bage Leaf With Stuffing

After our ini­tial expe­ri­ence with the All Red pota­toes we knew we wanted to try them mashed, but got dis­tracted find­ing ways to use up our CSA items with short shelf lives. So the pota­toes just sat around until this past week­end, when we decided to try them with some items from our most recent box. We’ve been inun­dated with cucum­bers, so we made a sim­ple cucum­ber salad with dill, mint, feta, and a bit of red wine vine­gar. We also had a gor­geous head of savoy cab­bage, the large leaves of which we decided to stuff for a main course.

Stuffed Cabbage Leaves

Stuffed Cab­bage Leaves

The recipe we used for the cab­bage came from here (I’ll give you the basics of the recipe, but fol­low the link if you want more expla­na­tion). First, blanch a few of the big leaves then set them aside to dry. Saute some diced onion (we used a cipollini), then add some of the inner cab­bage leaves, roughly chopped. Once the leaves have reduced some­what, add diced car­rot. Cook cov­ered for fif­teen min­utes or so, then stir in some chopped cooked bacon (the recipe actu­ally calls for speck, a Tyrolean ham, but we had bacon that needed to be used up). Spoon stuff­ing into the leaves, fold them up, grate some Parme­san on top, and bake for 15 min­utes at 200°.

Red Mashed Potatoes!

Red Mashed Potatoes!

The stuffed cab­bage was quite deli­cious, and the leaves turned out a gor­geous bright green. But, the visual stun­ner of our meal was unques­tion­ably the mashed pota­toes. The crim­son flesh, flecked with deep red skin and the green of fresh Ital­ian pars­ley was sim­ply aston­ish­ing. And they tasted great, too. The fla­vor is more com­plex than your stan­dard potato, but I don’t have a good way to describe it. Suf­fice it to say that mashed with pars­ley, gar­lic, cheese, but­ter, and a bit of milk, they delight three of the senses. If you ever see All Red pota­toes for sale, buy them!

The Broken Window

The broken window
By Jef­fery Deaver
Simon & Schus­ter, 2008
World­CatRead OnlineLibrary­ThingGoogle BooksUW-Madison

The Bro­ken Win­dow pits Lin­coln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs against a mys­te­ri­ous and devi­ous crim­i­nal whose M.O. is to care­fully frame inno­cent peo­ple for his thefts and mur­ders. His frame jobs are so per­fect that he has gone com­pletely unde­tected for years. His exis­tence only comes to light when Rhyme real­izes that the evi­dence in a mur­der inves­ti­ga­tion is too per­fect. Soon, the police find a num­ber of past cases that bear the same signs, in which inno­cent peo­ple may very well have been convicted.

With very lit­tle to go on, Rhyme et. al. set about learn­ing more about their quarry. But, he always seems to be a cou­ple of steps ahead of them; the closer they get, the more he seems to know about them and their plans. It quickly becomes appar­ent that this crim­i­nal can some­how find out any­thing about any­one — and in his hands, knowl­edge is cer­tainly power.

As is his wont, Deaver packs plenty of twists and red her­rings into his tale. In his last Rhyme/Sachs novel, The Cold Moon, the detec­tives were too good at antic­i­pat­ing the twists, which sucked some of the sus­pense out of the book. I think that Deaver han­dles his sur­prises bet­ter in The Bro­ken Win­dow; he keeps both the reader and the pro­tag­o­nists guess­ing. I also like that Deaver basi­cally sticks to a sin­gle plot in this book, rather than the inter­weav­ing of numer­ous sub­plots that he uses in some ear­lier books.

The only annoy­ance this novel holds for me has to do with Deaver’s dis­cus­sions of com­put­ers (which play a cen­tral role). His use of tech­no­log­i­cal terms and jar­gon feels slightly off in places, although he has improved a great deal sine The Blue Nowhere, his hacker mys­tery. This is a minor fault, though, and prob­a­bly wouldn’t bother any­one who isn’t some­what of a com­puter nerd.

Sprecher Brewery Tour

Sprecher Sign

Sprecher Sign

This past week­end, Veron­ica and I took a quick overnight trip to Mil­wau­kee. We went for a vari­ety of rea­sons: to visit her fam­ily, to see some of her friends, and to go to the big annual book sale at All Saints’ Cathe­dral down­town. Those plans left us some free time on Sat­ur­day, so we decided to take a tour of the Sprecher Brew­ing Com­pany in Glen­dale, a Mil­wau­kee sub­urb. Sprecher is best known for their root beer and seven other vari­eties of soda. And with good rea­son — the New York Times rated Sprecher root beer the best out of 25 brands from around the coun­try. Indeed, soda was the only prod­uct I asso­ci­ated with them until last week. But Ran­dall Sprecher started the com­pany as a beer brew­ery, and they brew a wide vari­ety of beers.

Giant Container of Honey

Giant Con­tainer of Honey

The tour was short (due to the small size of the brew­ery, but pretty good. Since it was the week­end, no one was there actu­ally brew­ing or bot­tling, but our guide gave detailed descrip­tions of both processes, along with some of the company’s his­tory. At the end of the tour of course comes the req­ui­site tast­ing ses­sion &mdash four sam­ples of your choice from a selec­tion of ten beers on tap. But we, along with about ten other peo­ple, bypassed the nor­mal tast­ing in favor of a spe­cial Reserve Tast­ing. This tast­ing included sam­ples of ten dif­fer­ent Sprecher beers (includ­ing some pre­mium vari­eties not avail­able in the reg­u­lar tast­ing), each paired with a dif­fer­ent cheese.

Badger Hops

Bad­ger Hops

We tried, in order, their Hefe Weiss, Extra Pale Ale, Mai Bock, Pub Brown Ale, IPA², Abbey Triple, Pipers Scotch Ale, Black Bavar­ian, Bar­ley Wine, and Bour­bon Scotch Ale. The var­i­ous cheeses came mostly from Wis­con­sin cheese mak­ers, includ­ing Sar­tori, Maple Leaf, Carr Val­ley, and oth­ers. The only cheese from out­side the state was the deli­cious Ker­ry­gold Dubliner, which was paired with Sprecher’s oak bour­bon barrel-aged Bour­bon Scotch Ale. Matt, the guy run­ning the tast­ing, did a great job telling us about each cheese and each beer as we went along, and we were pro­vided with tast­ing sheets with more detailed infor­ma­tion (IBUs, degrees Plato, types of hops, etc.) and space for tak­ing notes as we went.

Veronica at the Tasting

Veron­ica at the Tasting

It was nice to sam­ple so many beers at once; the process gave not only an overview of Sprecher’s beers, but a good side-by-side com­par­i­son of dif­fer­ent beer styles. I think Veron­ica and I agreed that the Abbey Triple was our favorite, fol­lowed closely by the Hefe Weiss. From there our indi­vid­ual rank­ings diverged some­what. The cheeses were all quite deli­cious. Who­ever selected the pair­ings knew what they were doing; some cheeses com­ple­mented their respec­tive beers, other pro­vided delight­ful con­trasts. This sort of thing seems to be catch­ing on — the New Glarus Brew­ing Com­pany (which I’ve now toured three times) near Madi­son just announced their own Hard Hat Tours, which are behind-the-scenes guided tours cul­mi­nat­ing in a beer and cheese tast­ing ses­sion. Per­haps it’s time for a fourth trip to New Glarus…

P.S. - Sorry about the crappy qual­ity of the pic­tures, three of them were taken with my phone.

Codex

Codex
By Lev Gross­man
Arrow, 2005
World­CatLibrary­ThingGoogle BooksUW-Madison

Edward Wozny is a hot­shot New York invest­ment banker who is about to assume a pres­ti­gious posi­tion at his firm’s Lon­don branch. At the begin­ning of what is sup­posed to be two weeks off to pre­pare for his move, Edward is sum­moned to an apart­ment owned by impor­tant clients of his com­pany — a British duke and duchess. He is charged with cat­a­loging their library, which had been sent to the United States for safe keep­ing dur­ing World War II and then promptly for­got­ten about. Edward is told to keep a sharp eye out among the old tomes for a cer­tain book by Ger­vase of Langford.

Lack­ing any train­ing in librar­i­an­ship or par­tic­u­lar inter­est in old books, Edward is ini­tially annoyed, but finds him­self strangely drawn in fol­low­ing an after­noon with the dusty vol­umes. He vis­its the Chenoweth Rare Book and Man­u­script Repos­i­tory, where he serendip­i­tously encoun­ters Mar­garet Napier, a Ger­vase of Lang­ford scholar. Although she (and most every­one else) con­sid­ers the book Edward is look­ing for to be a myth, she agrees to help with the cataloging.

Mean­while, a pro­gram­mer friend gives Edward a copy of a com­puter game called MOMUS. The game is hyper-real and some­what enig­matic; no one knows exactly who cre­ated it. Edward quickly becomes immersed in MOMUS, spend­ing more and more of his free time in the vir­tual world.

While exam­in­ing the con­tents of the library, Mar­garet becomes increas­ingly con­vinced that the mys­te­ri­ous book does exist, and was once a part of the col­lec­tion. She and Edward embark on a hunt to find the book. They dig up infor­ma­tion about the library’s his­tory, sneak into the Chenoweth’s mas­sive archival facil­ity, and unwit­tingly become embroiled in the schemes of British nobles. As they pro­ceed, Edward begins to notice eerie sim­i­lar­i­ties between MOMUS and their real-life quest.

The premise of Codex, with its for­got­ten library, myth­i­cal man­u­script, and eerily rel­e­vant com­puter game has poten­tial. But, the book itself turns out to be some­what lack­lus­ter and dis­ap­point­ing. MOMUS is set up to have impor­tant par­al­lels to the search for the Ger­vase book, but there are only ever a few of these. The whole com­puter game suplot seems under­de­vel­oped and out of place. Also, the book’s end­ing isn’t very sat­is­fy­ing. The plot gets increas­ingly com­plex, then just seems to peter out.

A cou­ple of errors (that should have been caught by an edi­tor) early in the book soured my opin­ion some­what, as well. One is a ref­er­ence to tree sap turn­ing into amber over a few thou­sand years (amber is formed from tree resin over mil­lions of years). The other is a men­tion of illus­tra­tions of “vivi­sected corpses” (“vivi-” mean­ing “liv­ing”; a corpse can be dis­sected, but not vivisected).

Codex is okay, not great. If you find it (as I did) at a used book sale for a buck and want a quick, largely mind­less read, go for it. Oth­er­wise, don’t bother.

Vilas Zoo

Tiger Through the Trees

Tiger Through the Trees

Last Sat­ur­day morn­ing, Veron­ica and I headed to Madison’s free Vilas Zoo. We met our friends Yi Hong and Steve there shortly after open­ing time, hop­ing to beat the crowds. Lit­tle did we know that the Green and Gold Train­ing Camp was going on that morn­ing, and hun­dreds of lit­tle Pack­ers fans and their par­ents had descended on the zoo. Luck­ily, the crowd mostly stayed occu­pied with things other than look­ing at the animals.

Iguana

Iguana

Although we’d been to the zoo a cou­ple of times before, we’d missed out on a few ani­mals and areas. This was the first time we saw the tiger in its enclo­sure; pre­vi­ously, there had just been signs up say­ing “Exhibit Closed.” We also ven­tured into the her­petar­ium, in which you can get pretty close to some of the snakes and rep­tiles (see left). A new Children’s Zoo with a play­ground and carousel opened a year or so ago, but we hadn’t real­ized that the area actu­ally houses more ani­mals — a red pan­das, a pair of meerkats, some white cock­a­toos and a huge African porcupine.

Click the pho­tos above for larger ver­sions, or check out the whole gallery here.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

The Omnivore's Dilemma
By Michael Pol­lan, Michael Pol­lan
Pen­guin, 2007
World­CatLibrary­ThingGoogle BooksUW-Madison

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pol­lan sets out to trace the ori­gins of three meals, each the prod­uct of a dif­fer­ent food chain. These food chains — the indus­trial, the pas­toral, and the per­sonal, as he calls them — basi­cally rep­re­sent in reverse order the var­i­ous human rela­tion­ships with food. In doing this, he hopes to shed light on what he terms America’s “national eat­ing dis­or­der:” we lack national food tra­di­tions, and are often so far removed from our food’s ori­gins that we have to rely on food com­pa­nies and nutri­tion­ists to tell us what to eat. For Pol­lan, this dis­or­der reached its height with the Atkins diet craze, that fad that sought to suck the soul (bread, pasta, even fruit!) out of Amer­i­can meals and replace it with large quan­ti­ties of meat.

In America’s indus­trial food chain, every­thing seems to revolve around corn. Gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies encour­age farms to pro­duce far more Zea mays than the Amer­i­can peo­ple can eat. It falls to food sci­en­tists to fig­ure out what to do with the sur­plus (and suc­cess­ful corn-based prod­ucts only lead to a demand for more corn). Today, corn is processed by so-called “wet mills” into dozens of diverse sub­stances: vit­a­mins, corn oil, adhe­sives, sta­bi­liz­ers, acids, ethanol, emul­si­fiers, and sweet­en­ers (includ­ing the sneak­ily ubiq­ui­tous high-fructose corn syrup). These var­i­ous “frac­tions” of corn are the build­ing blocks of the processed foods industry.

Read more

CSA Box Number Three

The Contents of Our Third Box

The Con­tents of Our Third Box

This morn­ing, we picked up our third CSA box of the sum­mer. This box was the biggest yet — 3/4 bushel, whereas our pre­vi­ous boxes were only 5/9 bushel. Plus, this time our farm offered basil as an ‘option’ crop, mean­ing that they left a huge box full of it at our pickup loca­tion and said “take as much as you want.” Since I neglected to bring a bag, I lit­er­ally stuffed my pock­ets full of basil. Tomor­row, we’ll make a big batch of pesto and freeze it in single-meal por­tions with the help of a cou­ple of ice cube trays. Our goal is to make enough while basil is in sea­son to make it through the win­ter (we eat lots of pasta).

While we have no doubt what to do with the basil, we’re not so sure about some of the other items. What, if any­thing, can you do with pick­ling cucum­bers other than pickle them? Can the two of us pos­si­bly make it through four reg­u­lar cucum­bers before they go bad? What should we do with beets? Can we find a way to pre­pare our cau­li­flower that we’ll actu­ally like? What’s spe­cial about Cip­polini onions? But, we’ve done pretty well with unfa­mil­iar veg­gies so far, so I’m sure we’ll have some inter­est­ing culi­nary adven­tures this week!

Coal

Coal
By Bar­bara Freese
Pen­guin (Non-Classics), 2004
World­CatLibrary­ThingGoogle BooksUW-Madison

In this book, Bar­bara Freese traces the entire his­tory of coal, reach­ing all the way back to the lep­i­do­den­dron forests of the Car­bonif­er­ous period. These forests pro­vided most of the organic mate­r­ial that turned into coal over hun­dreds of mil­lions of years. She reminds us that the energy we pro­duce through the burn­ing of coal (and other fos­sil fuels) ulti­mately came from the sun: the car­bon came from plants, like lep­i­do­den­dron, that grew by har­vest­ing solar energy through the process of photosynthesis.

But, as the book’s sub­ti­tle makes clear, this is pri­mar­ily a his­tory of humans and coal. Freese begins this his­tory with the Roman inva­sion of Britain in 43 A.D. Romans, find­ing exposed coal deposits through­out their new ter­ri­tory, dis­cov­ered that the mate­r­ial was eas­ily carved. They made jew­el­ery and other dec­o­ra­tions out of it. Some burned it for fuel, but it would take another thou­sand years for that prac­tice to become widespread.

From this point on, Freese chron­i­cles a num­ber of love-hate rela­tion­ships with coal. Among other things, coal can be burned for heat, to smelt iron, to power steam engines, and to gen­er­ate elec­tric­ity. But doing so pro­duces acrid black smoke and neces­si­tates the often very dan­ger­ous task of min­ing the fos­sil fuel. Freese’s account of the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion in Britain pro­vides a good exam­ple of both the desir­able and unde­sir­able prod­ucts of coal power: more and bet­ter iron, steam power, mech­a­nized fac­to­ries, loco­mo­tives; black­ened skies, mine explo­sions, slum­mish fac­tory towns, child fac­tory labor.

In addi­tion to a great deal about coal in Britain, Freese also cov­ers the his­tory of the fuel in the United States. With this she brings the story up to date, detail­ing how coal has shaped our country’s energy infra­struc­ture and nar­rat­ing a tour of a coal-fired power plant in Min­nesota. Freese offers her own exper­tise in the area of Amer­i­can energy pol­icy and leg­is­la­tion: she worked for a num­ber of years as an envi­ron­men­tal attor­ney for the State of Minnesota.

The penul­ti­mate chap­ter is devoted to coal use in China, the his­tory of which has many par­al­lels to that of Britain. Here, Freese betrays a Euro-centric world­view: China is rel­e­gated to the back of the book even though Chi­nese peo­ple began using coal for smelt­ing iron as early as 1100 A.D, and have been burn­ing it for fuel since around 4000 B.C. Still, she pro­vides an inter­est­ing overview of China’s his­tory with coal and the country’s cur­rent strug­gle to bal­ance the grow­ing energy needs that accom­pany mod­ern­iza­tion with inter­na­tional pres­sure to reduce air pollution.

All in all, this is a fas­ci­nat­ing book. Freese does a good job of con­nect­ing the his­tor­i­cal dots: she shows just ho inte­gral coal has been to the devel­op­ment of the indus­tri­al­ized world, some­times com­ing into play in unex­pected ways. This is another won­der­ful entry into the recent cat­e­gory of single-word-title mate­ri­als histories.

Happy 4th of July!

In honor of Inde­pen­dence Day, here are some shots I took last night of the Elver Park Fire­works dis­play in Madison:

Fireworks Fireworks Fireworks
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Fireworks Fireworks Fireworks

Click each pic for a larger version

Tennessee Council for the Social Studies Web Site

This week, I fin­ished work on a new web site for the Ten­nessee Coun­cil for the Social Stud­ies. From the site:

The Ten­nessee Coun­cil for the Social Stud­ies is an asso­ci­a­tion devoted to pro­vid­ing information,resources, and sup­port for all those involved in social stud­ies edu­ca­tion. This includes K-12 teach­ers, super­vi­sors of instruc­tion, and col­lege pro­fes­sors, in the var­i­ous dis­ci­plines inter­ested in and involved in the social studies.

Check it out at tncss.org

Pacific Vortex!

Pacific Vortex!
By Clive Cus­sler
Ban­tam, 1994
World­CatLibrary­ThingGoogle BooksUW-Madison

Dirk Pitt, Spe­cial Projects Direc­tor for the National Under­wa­ter and Marine Agency (NUMA) is sum­moned by the Navy to aid in the search for a top-secret sub­ma­rine. The sub, Star­buck, has gone miss­ing in an area called the Pacific Vor­tex, a coun­ter­part to the Bermuda Tri­an­gle. The searchers not only fail to find the sub, they are unable to find any trace of any of the almost forty ships known to have dis­ap­peared in the Vor­tex dur­ing the pre­ced­ing thirty years. Pitt’s inves­ti­ga­tion of the Star­buck — and the Pacific Vor­tex in gen­eral — leads him to van­ished sci­en­tists, leg­ends of a sunken Pacific civ­i­liza­tion, and a mys­te­ri­ous crim­i­nal mas­ter­mind known only as Del­phi.
Pacific Vor­tex! was the sixth Dirk Pitt novel to be pub­lished, but it was actu­ally the first one Cus­sler wrote. Indeed, its events take place before those of The Mediter­ranean Caper, Cussler’s first pub­lished novel. In a brief pref­ace, Cus­sler states that he was reluc­tant to pub­lish Pacific Vor­tex! because, among other rea­sons, “it does not weave the intri­cate plots of his [Pitt’s] later exploits.” Maybe I’m just get­ting sick of the for­mu­laic nature of the more recent books Cus­sler has “co-written” (what­ever that really means), but I liked this book because the plot wasn’t ridicu­lously intricate.

Our First CSA Box

Our First Box

Our First Box

This sum­mer, Veron­ica and I decided to pur­chase a join a CSA (community-supported agri­cul­ture) farm. CSA farms sell shares of their har­vest each year, and mem­bers typ­i­cally receive a box full of fresh, locally-grown, often organic pro­duce each week. Some farms also offer meat, cheese, eggs, honey, etc. Madi­son, in addi­tion to host­ing the largest producers-only farmer’s mar­ket in the coun­try, boasts the Madi­son Area Com­mu­nity Sup­ported Agri­cul­ture Coali­tion (MACSAC), which acts as an advo­cate for 35 area CSA farms.

The Box Opened

The Box Opened

We attended MACSAC’s annual Open House in late March, where we had the oppor­tu­nity to check out most of the par­tic­i­pat­ing farms. One thing we were look­ing for in a farm was the avail­abil­ity of half-shares — we doubted that the two of us could go through a huge box of veg­gies every week with­out waste. There were a num­ber of entic­ing options, and we ended up going with a farm called Dri­f­less Organ­ics. We liked their crop list, which includes can­taloupe, water­melon, straw­ber­ries, and var­i­ous herbs in addi­tion to a plethora of veg­eta­bles. We also like the fact that we could select a pick-up loca­tion that can be seen from our apart­ment. We get an assort­ment of pro­duces every two weeks — a lit­tle more than half a bushel each time.

A Bounty of Veggie

A Bounty of Veggies

Our first box of the sea­son arrived today. As with all CSAs, the selec­tion changes from week to week (or fort­night to fort­night is our case), and you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get each time. That’s half the fun: try­ing to fig­ure out what the heck to do with a veg­etable you with which you have lit­tle to no expe­ri­ence. I knew it was going to be a lot of food, but I was still astounded when I opened our box and spread its con­tents out on the kitchen counter. We got arugula, broc­coli, but­ter­head let­tuce, green onions, green gar­lic, kohlrabi, radishes, rus­set pota­toes, and spinach. Aren’t they gorgeous?

A share in a CSA farm is truly a share — if some­thing goes wrong with the crops, all the mem­bers eat (or rather, don’t eat) the losses. This is where the “community-supported” bit really comes in. If there’s a bad year, CSA farms are pro­tected from going under by their mem­ber­ship. Last year, there was exten­sive flood­ing in Wis­con­sin, which was detri­men­tal to many farm­ers. Here’s hop­ing that severe weather won’t be an issue this sum­mer, and that our boxes will con­tinue to be bountiful!