What happened on the pubcrawl

[Sloan, DT, Brandon]
Worts (Sloan, DT and Brandon) drinking beer at The Thirsty Scholar, the fifth stop on the 2013 pubcrawl.

Mostly, we drank beer. Here’s what I had:

Cambridge Brewing Company
They had just run out of the first thing I picked off of
their list (this time of year it’s really heavy on pumpkin
beers, which I don’t see any need for), so I had the cask. It
was their ESB, which is a good session beer, dry-hopped with
Chinook, and the people sitting next to me recommended it
highly, and after I recommended it highly one of the other worts
had one and also really liked it. I had joined earlier than I
said I would because it felt like lunch time, so I also had the
biscuits and gravy. They’ve changed it since the last time I
had it — it used to be two large biscuits and an enormous
amount of gravy on a plate, and I ended up taking about half of
both the biscuits and the gravy home. Now they give you a board with
three smaller biscuits and a bowl of gravy. So I ate all the
biscuits and ended up taking about half the gravy home. I also
bought two growlers. I live pretty close to between here and
the next stop, so I dropped them off at home. I joined 4 people
who had already had lunch at Meadhall.
Lord Hobo
I had the Trillium Valley buckwheat. At first I thought it
was a little sweet, but I got used to it pretty fast and really
enjoyed it. Several people ordered food, so I
took a donut someone offered me. I was also offered fritters
and corn cakes, but didn’t have anywhere to put them after the
biscuits and gravy and the donut and the beer.
Atwood’s
I had the Milk Stout Nitro. People had had it at both Lord
Hobo and the Meadhall, and enjoyed it a lot, so I ordered one
here. Again, I had to get used to how sweet it was, but once I
was, I was sorry to see the end of it.
Bukowsky’s
The Jack’s Abbey Kiwi Rising Double IPL. A nice dose (some
would say overdose) of hops to cut the sweetness of the last two
beers. We lost a several people after this stop, but were
joined by a new person.
Thirsty Scholar
The beer list here was a lot less stellar than the other
places. I had a Leffe Brown Ale. The new person from the last
stop was joined by his wife here.
R.F. O’Sullivan
I came here because they promised me good onion rings. I
had a Sierra Nevada Torpedo and a Black and Blue Burger with
onion rings. The onion rings were OK, but I like the ones at
Doyles better. The burger was outstanding, but I had to take
almost half of it home. Sammy agrees that it was good, but he
doesn’t seem to like blue cheese.

Apologies to Sloan for cutting some of his head off. The
camera on my phone is much better than the display, so I really
couldn’t see the composition of the picture at all when I took it.

Pub Crawl

I’ll be going on this Pub Crawl on Saturday. You can come too.

25th Annual Boston Wort Processors Pub Crawl

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Closest start T-stop = Kendall/MIT Station

Meadhall
4 Cambridge Center
Cambridge, MA 02142
11:30 – 12:50 (Lunch)
Cambridge Brewing Co.
1 Kendall Square #100
Cambridge, MA 02139
1:00 – 1:50
Lord Hobo
92 Hampshire St
Cambridge, MA 02139
2:00 – 2:50
Trina’s Starlite Lounge
3 Beacon St
Somerville, MA 02143
3:00 – 3:50
Thirsty Scholar Pub
70 Beacon St
Somerville, MA 02143
4:00 – 4:50
The Kirkland Tap & Trotter
425 Washington St
Somerville, MA 02143
5:00 – 5:50 (edit: the website says they don’t open until 5:30, so assume a half hour slippage will happen at some earlier site.)
R.F. O’Sullivan & Son
282 Beacon St
Somerville, MA 02143
6:00 – ? (Dinner)

Closest finish T-stop = Porter Square Station

I’ll probably join at Lord Hobo or so, and leave when I’ve had
enough beer.

News of the week of November 13, 2013

Meeting Report

We played:

Schedule

We will be meeting as usual on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM at my place.

Please remember to let me know whether you’re coming or not (or
if you’ve already said, if that changes).

Radicchio with blue cheese and balsamic vinegar

[radicchio]
Radicchio

You hardly need a recipe for this.

Cut the radicchio into wedges and bake them in a 350 degree
oven.

When they’re at the right degree of tenderness, sprinkle blue
cheese crumbs and balsamic vinegar on top, and put under broiler
until the cheese melts.

When I make this for myself for a main dish, I use half of a large head of
radicchio and put a layer of rice under the wedges. I like the
radicchip pretty al dente, so I only bake for 15 or 20
minutes. The broil part is only a couple of minutes.

How to use a swap box

The farm share ended last Thursday. I realized that it was
only towards the end of the summer that I was really using the
swap box right.

The swap box is a share box that’s put out so each shareholder can swap one thing that
they don’t want in their share for something they do want. I tend
to pick up my share fairly early, so I have a choice of pretty
much anything in the share; I suspect the people who come later in
the pickup period have fewer options.

What I realized was that there’s more in
the box than I can possibly eat, and I have friends who are
willing to take almost anything off my hands. So the thing to
concentrate on is what’s in the swap box that I want more of —
not what’s in the share that I don’t want any of. If there isn’t
anything that I can imagine using twice what’s in the share, I
don’t swap anything.

But usually there is. I just finished the second radicchio I
took a couple of weeks ago — they keep quite well, so since I
like them, having two instead of one wasn’t a problem. But the
parsley is quite nice, but I doubt that I would have finished two
bunches while they were still nice.

This last week I took a second bunch of mustard greens (leaving
the kale), which
work really well both in salads and with my <a href="http://serpentpublications.org/laymusic/?p=3540"rice and greens
breakfasts. They might wilt enough that you wouldn’t use them in
a salad before I finish them, but they’ll still be fine for cooked
greens.

Before Midnight

One of my reactions to this
movie
was, “They’re 41 and they think that’s
midnight?” But maybe there will be another one, when
they’re really old, like 61, that will be After Midnight.

If you liked Before
Sunset
and Before
Sunrise
, you’ll like this one, too. It might even be a little
bit better than the others, as the actors and maybe other crew
members have learned things.

They’re all the story of a couple who meet on a train when
they’re in their early twenties in the first movie, meet again in
their thirties in the second movie, and have an emotional day
together as a married couple in their forties. They’re all very
conversational, like some of the Eric Rohmer ones from the 60’s.
(Ma nuit chez Maude was the one I discovered.)

There are three major scenes — one between Ethan Hawkes and
his son by his first marriage, whom he’s putting on a plane to
go back to his mother; one at the dinner table among the writers
and their wives and children who’ve been spending the summer
together in Greece; and a very long one between the couple, who
have been given a night together in a hotel without the
children, and with a bottle of good wine. They’re all really
pretty interesting, and the couple manage to be both very angry
and very attractive in the way we want romantic movies to show us.


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Wave for Android

[tenor serpent mouthpiece]
Tenor serpent mouthpiece by Sam Goble.

Yesterday, I got a new
mouthpiece
for my tenor serpent.

The website says, “My mouthpiece dramatically improves the
tuning and makes the sound more direct and precise.” After a
day of fiddling with it, I agree about the sound, but I’m not
yet sure about the tuning. Sam warned me when he shipped it
that I would have to add some dental floss. Sure enough, as it
came from the box, it’s quite sharp, so I added dental floss so
that it wouldn’t go as far into the bocal, and then it was
flat.

So one of the things I spent a lot of time doing today was
playing tenor serpent notes into a tuner. I was originally
using the gstrings
tuner on my android phone. But it’s been telling me from time to
time that it has been superceded by something newer and better,
so I decided to look into that. The reviews complained a lot
about some features that were missing in the new version, called
waves,
but enough people thought there were improvements, that I
decided to try it.

Sure enough, the tuning is much better. Gstrings was
occasionally picking up the wrong overtone, so I would be
playing a possibly out of tune E, and it would be telling me I
was playing A. It doesn’t look like Waves ever does that.

The missing feature is that if you’re asking it to play a note
for you, you can’t at the moment specify the
octave that the note comes out in. Gstrings would let you do
that, but if you didn’t have a speaker plugged in, the bass
notes were practically inaudible, so you were better off with
the octave it picked anyway. I did think about plugging the
phone into a speaker, but didn’t get around to it.

In any case, getting Waves doesn’t remove Gstrings, so if you
really want to do that, you still can.

One of the reasons to get a smartphone is to replace all the
little standalone electronic gadgets. I’ve had some problems
with things like a pedometer, which works, but drains the
battery too much to be usable. I’d say the phone does replace a standalone tuner pretty well.