pyrodon and I are home from Prague now.

In about three and a half to four hours, pyrodon will be getting on the 71 bus to Harvard Square. Then we'll take the red line to South Station and the silver line to the airport, and then we'll check in, wait around a long time, and eventually board our plane. Then we fly to Milan, and then we fly to Prague.

We'll be back next Monday. Yes, we'll take pictures. Don't burn the internets down while we're gone.

72 of you are hereby cordially invited to proceed directly to Hell, with no stops for collecting $200.

No love,
Me

M. LeBlanc at Bitch Ph.D. gets at something that I've been thinking about for a while now. Go read it.

Frontpaged!

Or, I suppose, picking old ones back up.

But I finally got that little amp built, and found a convenient container to house it in. Now, of course, this meant having to get out my poor, neglected guitar, restring and tune it, and look up some information on basic scales and chords (thanks, WikiBooks!), since I've forgotten everything I ever knew about actually playing the damn thing. And then, hey, as long as I had the soldering iron out, why not try to fix up my old Pignose, which seemed to have a problem with its power jack?

My left-hand fingertips hurt like hell, but I have to admit, I missed it. Maybe this time around I'll have more patience to stick with practicing than I did, um, I guess about 14 years ago.

They accidentally let a cogent and incisive critique of one of the commoner dodges used to pretend there's no element of sexism in attacks on/opposition to Senator Clinton. I assume someone will have their pay docked, at least, over this.

It turns out that when you haven't picked up the guitar in years, and you get it out and restring (having surprisingly had the foresight long ago to buy a few extra packs of strings) and tune it, even just playing a few scales leaves your fingertips mighty tender.

But, I finally got that little amp circuit put together on a breadboard and hooked up to a crappy little speaker and a battery, and it works! This shouldn't be terribly surprising, since I followed the directions pretty much to the letter, but honestly, I'm pretty excited any time I don't screw up simple and well-documented procedures. It would sound much better with a speaker that wasn't a cheap piece of crap, though. Now I just need to get it actually soldered together on a circuit board, and mounted in some kind of enclosure.

And build the calluses back up on my left hand. Oh yeah, and actually learn how to play.

In other news, Jeff Jacoby is a fuckwit, but if you feel like getting all stabby, by all means read his column. I really suspect he and Jonah Goldberg are actually the same person.

So recently on my commute to work I've been, as all good-hearted and righteous people must from time to time, rocking out to Pearl Jam's Ten at high volume, with the windows down when weather permits.

But today I thought about it, and recalled (with some help from the Internets) that that album came out in August of 1991, fully a month before even Nevermind, and in fact it's older than most high-schoolers.

In short, goddamn I'm old.

I've also been thinking, in listening to Ten, that there are some pretty solid possible interpretations of some of the songs on there that I had never considered as a callow youth. For example, "Oceans" seems at first glance to be power-ballad of yearning for a faraway lover. But with lyrics like "Hold onto the thread/The current will shift," and "Waves roll in my thoughts/Hold tight the ring/The sea will rise/Please stand by the shore/I will be, I will be there once more," references to dreams, and weird crooning and incoherent yelling that are interspersed, it's just as easy to read it as the mad, keening song planted in sleeping cultists' minds by the dreams of an ocean-imprisoned Great Old One.

Also, I think "Porch" is about fomenting violent political revolution.

(Or perhaps this is senile dementia setting in?)

Achewood, I mean, christ, I know you're sexist, but do you have to be that sexist?

I'll post something of more substance soon, perhaps.

But! Everyday Shooter is available for PC now, on Steam.

This is important news, because it means there are now no (currently available) platform-exclusive games which are compelling reasons to buy a PS3.

I'm going to write more about this soon, but I wanted to at least get the link some propagation, because I think it's an important article, with significant consequences: Scientific American reports on new findings about implicit bias.

I posted about this over here, but I know no one reads that, so I'll mention it here, too. Please read Darcy Burner's post at OpenLeft and consider asking your Senators and Representatives to cosponsor S.2398 and H.R.4102, respectively.

Someone at Fox News — more importantly, someone in charge of what goes on the screen at Fox News — knows, well, about as much about history as you might guess, considering it's Fox News. But no, in fact, the Lincoln-Douglas Debates were between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, not Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

I think I'm going to try building one of these this weekend.

Via pyrodon: Schadenfreude Pie. Yum!

I have no idea who this Scalzi fellow is, some manner of scribbler of fantastic tales, I gather; but he sure bakes a mean pie. And I use the term "mean" advisedly.

Yesterday, after failing to find either of the guitars I was interested in trying out at the Guitar Center in Natick, I headed back over to the mall to pick up pyrodon, who was getting jeans. As it happened, the most convenient place to park was outside the new Nordstrom that's gone in there, so I walked through that into the rest of the mall. As I walked through the store, I realized that it wasn't just that it was still rattling around my head from being in the CD player in my car — they were, in fact, playing The New Pornographers' "My Rights Versus Yours" on the sound system at Nordstrom.

I'm trying hard not to get all Indie Rock Pete about it.

I forgot to mention: pyrodon has made her decision. We will not be moving to Madison.

Here's an article about the professor who will, most likely, be pyrodon's advisor, from back when she had just gotten tenure.

The only major downside as far as I'm concerned, here, is that in Madison we could get a pretty good sized house for half the price of an inexpensive house half the size in Waltham or Watertown, and that's not even considering the more expensive neighboring towns. But balanced against staying here, in (well, next to) the city I love most, keeping my job, not having to live apart for a year, etc., that's small potatoes, and none of that really matters anyway, because I was very insistent that my preferences not be a significant factor in pyrodon's decision, unless she found the two schools so evenly matched that she simply had no other way to discern which would be best for her. (And as it was, things nearly came to that point, but I'm much happier that she made the best choice for her without needing reference to external factors.)

So rufinia mentioned being able to get a compost bin from the City of Somerville, and I was all envious, until it finally occurred to me to actually check on the Town of Watertown website — and sure enough, Watertown sells them too, for $25 apiece. Awesome! Now I probably won't bother building my own.

(But I'll still take your compost, too, rufinia — I want my garden to flourish!)

The peas should probably be starting to sprout any day now. The lettuce and chard and hops shouldn't be far behind, and by the time the peas are ready to harvest it'll be close to time to plant tomatoes. Yay!

In unrelated matters, I highly recommend the New Pornographers' latest album (I think of it as "new" because I'm slow, but it came out in August), Challengers.

Dear local supermarkets,

Peanut oil and mason jars are not, repeat not bizarre or rare specialty items. As such, I should not be unable to find them in your aisles. Please see to this immediately.

One of the things I wanted to do when we moved into this apartment, back in September (that is, one of the reasons we especially liked this apartment) was to start a backyard garden. As it's turned out, our upstairs neighbors want to garden also, so they've got a corner of the yard they dug up with a borrowed rototiller back in the fall, and I had been planning to put in a raised bed. Well, things had been a bit busy around here for a while — but I've finally done so! I've got a preorder in for hop rhizomes (Cascade, Mt. Hood and Sunbeam), and when it gets warmer we'll put in tomatoes and move our herbs outside. I may put in some peas and/or chard, which I understand are good things to grow earlier in the season, and will leave space for warmer-weather crops later.

pyrodon: is doing very well, probably going back to work next week, almost no longer radioactive enough that I sleep in the office.

beer: yes, lots. I made an amber ale that went over very well, so I made a second batch (the first being all gone). It was bottled a week ago this past Sunday. Yesterday I made a brown ale, which should be going into bottles in a couple of weeks. A long time ago I made a pilsener, which has been lagering in my basement for a while, and will be getting bottled this coming Saturday. When I get some spare time I mean to finally finish my mash/lauter tun, and then I'll need to get a bigger (ten-gallon) brewpot and an outdoor propane burner, because my stove is not up to the task of bringing 6.5-7 gallons of wort to a boil, and I can start doing all-grain brews. Planning the much-belated sequel to 2004's World Champion Strong Red Ale, called World Champion II, which is a reformulation of the original recipe to be all-grain; and Grove Street Imperial RyePA, a massive IPA made with rye malt and flavored with caraway seed.

apartment: is really not big enough for three people, and I cannot wait until pyrodon's mom leaves on Saturday (not that I don't like her, and she's been a big help to pyrodon during the two hypothryoid-and-weird-diet weeks and the subsequent radioactive-and-can't-be-too-near-people week, but it is very cramped around here). But! I'm gonna make me a garden. I bought a circular saw (with a laser!) and three 8' 2x8s, and promptly turned one of them into two 4' boards instead. On Friday, when it's nice out again, I'll make them into a rectangle, which I will place in the backyard, line with landscaping plastic, and fill with dirt. Sometime in the first couple weeks of April, I should get a call from the brewshop that the hop rhizomes have come in, and I can go get my Cascade, Mt. Hood and Sunbeam, and put them in the ground. Also planning to grow tomatoes, herbs (basil, parsley, cilantro, perhaps others, modulo what will actually take), perhaps lettuce, perhaps peppers, perhaps cucumbers, perhaps squashes.

work: busy, sometimes stressful, getting better. Awfully process-heavy at times.

Trader Joe's raspberry & brie fillo rolls: tasty.