The Unicorn Petting Zoo

From: http://beernotes.com/midwest/articles/000253.html

The Frugal Yeastmaster

Parallel culturing allows you to create a six pack of yeast starters
February, 1996

So you’re sold on the idea of using liquid yeast but you’re too cheap….er, frugal to pop for the full price every time you brew. But you’re not quite ready to go whole hog with agar, slants and inoculation loops. Give this procedure a shot. It’s called parallel culturing and it allows you to create a six pack of yeast starters from a single package of liquid yeast. Hey, this is cheaper than using dry yeast! We picked up this suggestion from Rick Cavasin in a posting in the America Online Homebrewing section.

You will need:

1 - package of liquid yeast (Wyeast, Brewtek, etc.)

1-1/2 - cup Dry Malt Extract

1 - One gallon glass jug with rubber stopper and airlock to fit.

1 - Funnel

6 - clean beer bottles and caps

Sanitizing solution (Bleach, 200 proof ethanol or iodophor)

Step One: Pop the yeast package and let it work according to the directions, usually 24 hours before you are set to do the next step.

Step Two: Prepare a half gallon of starter wort by adding the dry malt extract to hot water and bringing it to a gentle boil for 10-15 minutes. Remove from heat and cover. Let cool to 80-degrees F.

Step Three: Thoroughly sanitize gallon jug, stopper, airlock and funnel. Rinse if needed (if you use bleach, that is.)

Step Four: Using the funnel, pour the package of yeast into the gallon jug, followed by the cooled starter wort. Attach stopper and airlock, agitate, and allow to ferment at approximately 70-degrees until all signs of fermentation cease.

Step Five: Sanitize your 6 beer bottles. Thoroughly agitate the gallon jug to get all the yeast sediment in suspension and carefully fill your bottles using the sanitized funnel and cap. Store these starters in refrigerator. They should keep up to six months.

Step Six: Two days before brewing, prepare another starter (see Step Two) and after sanitizing the outside of the bottle, pour your yeast solution into the jug of wort. Cap with airlock, agitate, maintain a steady temperature of 70-degrees F. and it should be ready to pitch in two days.

Sanitation is especially critical when handling yeast starters. Extra care at this stage will reward you with better beer down the line. If the first couple of batches turn out well, you might consider making another generation of starters from one of your remaining samples. Then you’ll really be frugal!

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I wonder if the right will ever accept that big media is situated in big cities and puts the people who work in big media in a social setting that discourages the sorts of bigotries that the right holds dear. I wonder if the right will ever accept that local, small town reporters who are pursuing local, small town stories probably need to treat their sources like they’re human beings, thus learning that some of their prejudices may have been misguided. I wonder if the right will ever accept that over a long period of time, these two elements alone probably account for the bulk of the “liberal bias” that reporters are accused of. They may even vote Republican, those liberal reporters and editors, but an awful lot of them just aren’t carrying around the overt preconceptions that the right believes are at the core of American values.

In Georgia, it’s now past midnight, early in the day of June 16. Nearly 9am in Tehran, day five of election and post election shenanigans. Within hours of polls closing on Friday, June 12, the government declared incumbent Ahmadinejad the winner, and holy hell has followed.

We can’t know today whether Iran is experiencing a revolution, but the last days have felt like 1989 all over again, when the streets of Warsaw and East Berlin flooded with marchers, candlelight vigils lit up Eastern Europe, and finally, some six weeks later (if memory serves — I was 14 at the time) on a November night, throngs climbed atop the Berlin Wall with hammers and went to work.

Iran’s Islamic Revolution happened in 1979. I was three, give or take, and remember nothing at all about the events. I certainly saw hostage footage from the long standoff there when I was young, and Iran of course has always been a quasi-enemy state in my lifetime, though its prominence as a bogeyman grew after the Cold War subsided, and its nuclear program and American paranoia combined to make it part of the Axis of Evil.

But here’s the thing: Iran is a modern nation filled with affluent, educated people, sprawling cities (Tehran is home to some 14M, according to one report I saw somewhere today), and a lengthy history as the regional power in the mid east. Its people are pro-Western, cosmopolitan, and most of all, young. Iranians have consistently sought a more open government with better ties to the west throughout my adulthood, attempting to use their deeply flawed democracy to install reformers again and again. Sometimes this has worked, but official mischief from its theocratic, unelected, unaccountable leadership has prevented real reform.

Iran is a nation of paradox, and for the last five days, Iran has been on fire. Using cell phone cameras, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, Iranians managed to organize massive rallies, some of them illegal, and broadcast pictures, video, and information to an eager world. Universities have been raided by the police, students beaten and killed, ordinary citizens have been attacked in the streets, journalists ejected, and a great deal of violent mayhem has seemingly done nothing to diminish the size of the crowds. Reports from the illegal marches on Monday, now yesterday, put the numbers in Tehran as high as 1M people.

People have died, been injured, been censored. Iranian Twitterers using the hashtag #IranElections have constantly sought new proxy addresses through which to upload information out of the country, and geeks worldwide have created and broadcast them. They request media coverage of their demonstrations, but in the absence of adequate journalism, they are creating it themselves.

It may be that this began as a push to install Mir Hussein Mousavi to the presidency, which he likely won, but I have to wonder if that will be sufficient now. Using the same tools with which the Iranian people have built this protest movement, they seem to now be organizing a revolution, a new political order to replace the unaccountable establishment behind their government. Andrew Sullivan, who has provided amazing coverage of this remarkable, heroic series of events, today posted a 7-point agenda being distributed among Iranians online. It includes reform of Iran’s constitution, or whatever passes for a constitution there, which suggests to me that these people are very interested in insuring that these events can never again be inflicted on the people of Iran. It suggests that a second Iranian Revolution is under way.

I’ve believed for years that a truly democratic Iran would be a strategic partner to the US and the west on any number of important issues. Ally might be too strong a word, but certainly a constructive element in regional affairs where its interests matched ours. Think France, without the long history of partnership. Part thorn in side, part friend, depending on the situation.

It seems to me non-negotiable that a free Iran would have to drop nuclear ambitions to join the world as a partner, but if a new democratic government in the midst of forming accountable power structures could give the world that one item, I believe that the future of Iran, the Middle East, and the United States would suddenly veer onto a much more salutary path. A truly democratic Iran, next to a democratic Iraq, alongside Jordan and Turkey would provide a powerful, yes, axis in the middle east to counterbalance the repressive regimes of… well, everyone else there.

It’s a beautiful dream. For the last five nights, the cities of Iran have listened to the shouts of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of voices calling Alahu Akhbar into the darkness from rooftops and the streets below. God is Great, they shout, and Death to the Dictator. By day, they march at illegal rallies, suffer beatings, breathe tear gas, and hoist signs in English that ask, “Where is my vote?”

If God is Great, the people of Iran will soon be free of the theocratic dictatorship behind their elected leaders. They are doing the hard work, guiding their nation on an uncertain path, but finally a path of their own choosing. We all hope their strength holds and that the thugs on motorcycles, the police, the paramilitary baseej, and the imported security forces brought in to terrorize the marchers end up isolated in a sea of peaceful protesters and simply give up. Iran has been confined for too long. Iranians deserve to be free. If God is Great, they soon will be.

Interesting. Today there’s an election in a large country which is a major player in its region and is seen by many as a global antagonist. On one side is a relatively moderate candidate seeking better engagement with the world and more openness domestically. Urban dwellers have turned out by the hundreds of thousands to show their support at rallies leading up to the election.

On the other side is a belligerent candidate known for having little understanding of economics. He’s recognized more for saber rattling than policy pronouncements. He has suggested war as a reasonable reaction to tensions with enemies who are not aggressors, and his relationships with world leaders leave a lot to be desired. His support is drawn from rural residents, who consider him a bulwark against the growth of the cosmopolitan urbanites and their modern ways.

That’s Iran of course. Figures they’d be our adversaries. In many ways, we have identical problems and cultural divides. And best of luck to Mousavi, whose campaign appears to have sparked record turnout. Hopefully the Iranian government won’t quash an outcome it doesn’t like, and hopefully a change in administration there will be a door to the kinds of large scale reforms that ordinary Iranians want and deserve.

Irony: Mousavi’s campaign colors are green. I’m pretty sure the Bushies and their friends who love to name a change of foreign dictators “the so-and-so revolution” will *not* call a Mousavi win “The Green Revolution.” For further irony, read this ThinkProgress report on the neo-con reaction to the race in Iran.

I follow Sarah Palin on Twitter.  Here are two messages from the last 12 hours or so that almost provide a definition for why republicanism is shrinking. One:

On my way to intro Michael Reagan & hear him speak re: what his wise, innovative father, Pres. Reagan, would do in these challenging times.

Two:

Great talk by Michael Reagan tonight. Encouraged by his conservative ideals & commonsense.

This is the full monty: the blowjob to the corpse of a president who left office two decades ago, followed by the incredibly important notation of the speaker’s “conservative” ideals and common sense. Not “American”, no, but “conservative”, the team whose members’ identities shift in and out of the GOP, who are ardent followers of philosophers they’ve most likely never read, who dream of shrunken government but can’t seem to think of anything in particular to cut (hint: Defense has a few coins rattling around that we could reappropriate, minor changes to social security will take care of that until sometime in the next millennium, and then *get to work* on tackling medicare).

But don’t give them policies. Give them talks by prominent conservatives (the more Reagany, the better!). Give them group therapy in the warm glow of a dead president whose economic legacy is, well, the times I’m living through right now. Reagan won the debate about economics, and we’ve spent my lifetime letting industries, including the financial industry, run further and further amok. This great recession is one legacy of Ronald Reagan and his acolytes, and the enormous polarization that threatens the ability of government to operate (60 votes are now required to pass even mundane legislation through the Senate) is a direct consequence of the calcified dinosaurs whose rigid stewardship of a misremembered presidency increasingly shuts out policy ideas.

And Sarah Palin — symptom of the disease — is a favorite for the Republican nomination in 2012. This country is fucked.

When listening to Dick Cheney, does it ever cross your mind that he’s exhibit A for why America should take mental health treatment much more seriously?

First marigold bloom. I started a dozen or so from seed, in cups, in my kitchen window back in February. These guys are about 4′ tall. Never knew marigolds could be so tall. I’ve since added a couple of heirloom varieties, French and Star Signet, and hope to end up with interesting hybrids next year.

Two days ago, a Kansas doctor named George Tiller was murdered. Tiller provided abortion services, even late term abortion services.

Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. I was born in 1976. The entirety of my life has included this shrill, histrionic debate, and having lived through the Clinton years and now watching the tenor of things as the Obama years get underway, this is what I believe about America:

When the American right loses power, it hoards guns, builds bombs, works its more impressionable members up into an apocalyptic fury, and then privately rejoices when Americans engaged in legal activities are murdered in cold blood. The pro-life warriors are the most skilled at this, but I also remember the bombing of The Otherside bar here in Atlanta in the 1990s, the bombing at the Olympics, and who can forget Timothy McVeigh? Really, as Hilzoy highlighted last night, it probably can’t be said any better than Athenae has said it:

For eight fucking years anybody to the left of Pinochet had to kick back and watch while sensible centrists and the Coalition of the Involuntarily Committable got together and raped the country and fucked up the whole world. For eight fucking years we were told that marching in the streets with giant puppets was the most horrific form of treason imaginable, was demoralizing our troops and hurting the debate and making the baby Pope Benedict cry. Not once did I ever in that time hear Megan McArdle or any of her other sensible friends discuss how maybe, just maybe, President Bush and his administration had PUSHED us to the edge, where we HAD to make those puppets because we felt the political process was closed to us.

No, back then it was “elections have consequences” and “you lost” and “look upon my works, ye mighty, and fuck off,” and anytime anybody had the temerity to say, “erm, dude, if you don’t mind I’ll be over here with this sign on a stick” they might as well have been plotting to shoe-bomb Air Force One the way the whiners in the nuttersphere howled and shrieked. There was none of this, “you just don’t know how hard it is to be on the losing end of everything including your soul” back then. Just them, partying with Free Republic on the White House lawn, waving their big foam fingers in our faces going “nyah nyah nyah.”

Now that they’re out of power, natch, what choice do they have but to go shoot up church lobbies in the hopes of bagging abortion doctors for their trophy wall of American apostates? Really, what else could they do? It’s not like they could vote, or convince other people to listen to them, or organize, or do any of the damn things I feel like we’ve been doing since before there was dirt in order to get a not-entirely-crazy in-another-life-he’d-be-a-moderate-Republican dude finally elected so a third of the country could act like Satan just put his feet up on their mother’s white-clothed dinner table. It’s not like they could do anything else, right? They had to start shooting.

They just had to. And I guarantee that they’re not done yet.

Perchance to dream. Just got up from an afternoon nap. Vivid dreams. Haven’t in a while. I assumed because it was best not to know the evil warping through my head. Today: girls, parents, performances, a new cell phone, logistics for meeting. I feel a little woozy upon waking, but woke up hungry. Also a good thing — I haven’t had a proper appetite in a week or so. Funny how ten pounds can vanish into a depression. I think I’ll brew a cup or two of coffee.

I haven’t been sleeping well either, so these hard zonks where the brain filters through the neural cheesecloth are important.

Tonight I’m seeing the fiction writer for drinks again. I’ve definitely thought of her often since I saw her last week. I sent her an impromptu text message on Saturday. She sent me a wholly unsolicited birthday note. I like the back and forth, and since I feel certain that the conversation tonight will be just as good as last week (Bob Hicok!), I’m looking forward to it very much.