Good Head: Ballast Point Sculpin IPA
Here’s a nice new beer to try for the weekend.
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of San Diego County’s breweries. In fact, they’re easily my favorite thing about San Diego. Granted, I’m not much of a beach person, but going down to North County to sample beers is one of the best uses of a Southern California Saturday afternoon I can imagine. The breweries are easy to get to, close together and distinctive enough to warrant checking out several instead of camping out at just one. With a large facility they built from the ground up, the biggest in the area is easily Stone Brewing Co.─who have a fantastic free tour that includes samples, by the way─with others, like the ever delicious Mother Earth Brew Co., being as small as a single suite in a single-level office park. I like to think I’ve been to lots of the area’s breweries, but in reality, I’ve probably been to less than 25% of the fine establishments that make up the San Diego Brewers Guild. One of the bigger ones I’ve never had a chance to visit is Ballast Point. I’ve wanted to go, but it’s far enough away from where I usually go to be written off as “maybe next time” every time. Boy, was that a mistake.
A few weeks back I had a nice time getting bad genuinely fucking terrible service at Slater’s 50/50 with two friends, and one of them had me try his Ballast Point Sculpin IPA. Now, I’m not much of an IPA guy (unless it’s Port Brewing’s seasonal High Tide IPA), so I tried it more as a courtesy to him than out of actual interest. Much to my surprise, it was beyond fantastic. I’ve since had it several more times. Sculpin IPA has that hoppy, citrusy crispness typically associated with the IPA style, but the execution uses just the right amount of sweetness and a note of tropical fruit to bring a perfect balance to a style of beer that can sometimes overwhelm the palate with bitterness. I would recommend it to anyone, even lovers of canned domestics, and I’m recommending it to you right now.
Ballast Point is my new go-to summer beer, and I think after you try some, it will be yours, too.
The next gross food challenge
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Now, I’m ready for a new challenge. Next up, I’ll be taking on that vile corn dog/Hot Pocket monstrosity you see pictured above, and after that… Well, I’m not sure. I’m asking you, the readers, to come up with my next vile food challenge. The rules are below the fold.
Election Hangover
This will be my last post on the 2012 presidential race. I promise. We’re all sick of it, but there’s a little bit left to go over. I’m even hiding it behind a “more” link for those of you that just can’t take it anymore. You can find clips, reactions, thoughts and lessons learned after the break.
Interesting Stuff Roundup – Nov. 5, 2012
I was going to call this News Roundup, but lots of this doesn’t actually constitute news.
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- Three million iPads were sold over three days. That’s a combined total of the iPad Mini and iPad 4 (yes, they did just release the iPad 3 just a few months ago). Now, you can make a compelling argument that the iPad is the best 10 inch class tablet on the market, but the iPad Mini has weaker specs and a screen with lower pixel density than the competition. Plus, it’s about $100 more than those tablets with the better specs and screens. The iPad Mini is what you buy when you insist on being seen with an Apple product, nothing more. It is the ultimate expression of brand whoring. Good job, consumers.
- I’ve been watching the show Revolution. It never looked good, but a super team-up like Eric Kripke, John Favreau and J.J. Abrams is something any geek will watch. As it turns out, I was right. It isn’t good. In fact, it’s downright stupid at times, but for some reason I can’t stop watching. Lucky for all of us, Cracked is in the same boat.
The 10 Dumbest Things on TV So Far This Season | Cracked.com
- This is Mayor Bloomberg’s ASL interpreter. Her name is Lydia Callis, and she’s become a bit of an internet sensation. While some stills are pretty funny and others are just in poor taste, some people are taking her new found internet stardom to mean that we internet folk are making fun of deaf people and/or ASL. We’re not. Still images of very expressive faces and body language taken from videos out and put out of context are funny, hearing or no.
- CBS is finally making some of its programming available through Hulu. Unfortunately, it’s all back uncatalogued stuff which makes Hulu the 100,000,000,000th place to run CSI reruns. To compound the problem, the shows will only be available through your paid Hulu Plus account.
- New Jersey Governor Chris Christie scored some major points with me this week. I don’t care if our political views don’t line up. His response to Sandy has been fantastic. Governor Christie showed the whole world what an effective leader he is when he put the people of the Garden State ahead of partisanship and politicking and went a step further by shutting down attempts to make the devastation caused by Sandy in to a political issue. When push came to shove, Christie was working for the people, and that is to be admired….And this clip from Fox News doesn’t hurt either. [longer version here, Mitt Romney saying he would shut down FEMA here]
- Here is a great video from W. Kamau Bell that goes after voter ID laws. I’ve been a fan of his since his show Totally Biased debuted earlier this year on FX.It’s always been easy for me to relate to comics like Bell. The experience of being someone who can be identified as a minority on sight is something that transcends which minority group you belong to, even if the details of what you encounter vary from group to group. Black people, Latinos, Asians, Arabs, Indians, and even White people visiting countries where they’re in the minority… We’ve all dealt with this in some form or another. Just last week I was at the opening night of a really great play, and at the after party, I found myself engaged in what has become my least favorite question and answer session. The woman who took the open seat next to me started the conversation off by talking about the play and then moved on to a simple “Where do you live?”, and as is so often the case these days, saying I was from the next city over was not a good enough answer. “But where are you from?” I told her I used to live in a city south of where we were and that my hometown is Long Beach. That was still not enough. She then asked where I was born. I told her Long Beach, her eyes went wide with surprise, and she quickly changed the subject by to something play related. This happens far more than you’d think.
That might not seem like huge deal, but I find the assumption that people of color must not be American to be deeply offensive and incredibly small-minded. It doesn’t make me freak out or get angry. What it does is make me sad for humanity. I don’t think people ask questions like that out of malice or because they think I shouldn’t be an American, but I think it shows a level of ignorance about those around you that really shouldn’t still exist over a decade in to the 21st century, especially not in a place as diverse as Southern California. I was born here, and I don’t have a foreign accent. I was being asked where I was born because my brown half is more visible than my white half. I will say this, though. There is something funny about such a PC approach to racism.
Another cat for the interwebz
This is Atticus. He is my cat, and when you get out a camera, he immediately stops doing cute things.
Give him your own caption or create your own meme at MemeCreator.org.
I’m Back
The real world has kept me busy for a few days, but I have been saving links, stories and general thoughts. Expect a serious brain dump today.
Daylight Savings Time, Go Away
We all know I’m not a fan of Daylight Savings Time. I’d go over it again, but I already lost an hour today.
My question now is: how does Daylight Savings Time still exist in California? Several other states have freed themselves from the bondage of arbitrary time changes, so why can’t we? We’ve used voter initiatives for far dumber things. We’re the state that used voter initiatives to prove we could be just as bigoted and insecure as the flyover states and to bend over for energy companies. Surely we can get a voter initiative together that would do away with the semiannual exercise in surrendering so much power to government that they can control our clocks. Plus, the world is now more than 50% urbanized, so on top of just being stupid, Daylight Savings Time costs more in energy.
True Story: Cars, Coffee and Cocaine
Let me tell you a little story…
The year was 2007. I was a 20 year-old community college student with too much free time on my hands, and I spent much of that free time smoking pot and hanging out at a coffee shop by the beach that used to be a pretty cool spot. On this particular night I was out on the patio of this little coffee shop talking to my buddies, two of whom actually worked there. We agreed to match bowls and hotbox a friend’s car. If you don’t know what hotboxing is, imagine a steam room and replace the steam with weed smoke. I wandered out to my car to get my goodie bag only to see a guy standing next to it like he was peeing on the side my car and a woman standing behind him with a few things thrown across my trunk. At the time, I drove a black 2003 Mercury Marauder. I loved that car and took amazing care of it, but it was frequently mistaken for a police car. My first assumption was that this guy was some drunk jackass from the bar next door thinking he was being cool by taking a leak on a squad car, but I quickly found out that this wasn’t the case at all. Read More…
Is SimCity 5 Just Around the Corner?
SimCity 5, is that you?
I am a pretty hardcore SimCity fan. If you count up the time I’ve spent with The Elder Scrolls series, the Mass Effect games and the KOTOR games then double it, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t come close to the time I’ve spent playing games from the SimCity franchise. To this day, I am a fairly active member of the SimCity community of fans and still like to tweak SimCity 4 with mods. Of everyone who hated SimCity Societies, I hated it the most. Yes, I am a SimCity super fan.
Jimdo, a Spanish language gaming site, is reporting that German gaming magazine GameStar is saying the game is 30% finished and due to be released in 2013. They also have images posted that are supposedly concept art. In addition to this, an EA-Maxis event is being held on Tuesday at GDC. According to their own website we can expect a huge announcement. Needless to say, I’m so excited I can barely see straight.
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