Drunken Pumpkin

I don’t have any pics to go along with this, but I’ll explain why here in a second.

My father-in-law is a private pilot, and flies a tiny plane called Piper Tripacer. If you have no experience with single engine planes I suggest you listen to Henry Rollins piece “Eric the Pilot”. Rollins goes into a great deal of detail of the experience of being in one of these tiny little machines that he aptly calls a “canoe with a plank.”

I was in the canoe with a plank, holding on for dear life, while we pitched around the sky of midwestern farm country when I spotted what looked a lot like crop circles. Now, the fact that I was afraid for my life deterred me from asking for the camera to take a picture of this phenomenon. Alas, I don regret that because they were so peculiar.

We’ve all seen pictures of crop circles before. They are stunning if only for their peculiar precision and geometric form. But what happens to those that are a little less than perfect? Surely they don’t all turn out so pristine the first time out? And it isn’t like you can erase an error in a field. What I saw looked an awful lot like a young alien working out the controls of his crop circle-omatic.

Instead of clean geometry the field was filled with strange loops and odd scribbles. It looked a little like someone decided to frame the field with the drawing of a confused five year old. Honestly, it was really quite striking for its lack of symmetry.

Either that or it was a strange pattern of crops that had been washed out. Who knows?

Tune in next time for Bartitsu! With pictures!

For instance, I’m certain that this man thought the t-shirt he’s wearing was hilarious in the store…

Really, what could I possibly call this post that would be better than the material provided?

This would be an effective speed bump.

depression’s got a hold of me
depression, i gotta break free
depression’s got a hold on me
depression’s gonna kill me.
-Black Flag Depression

I attempted to brew some Root Beer this past week. The result was catastrophic failure. Okay, maybe not catastrophic, per se, but the end result was absolute crap.
For those of you so inclined to brew your own sodas, make sure you follow a single set of instructions, unlike myself. You see, you can make this stuff in pretty small batches right in a 2 liter bottle, or you can make bigger batches of it in a brewing pail, just like real beer. The processes are each a little different. The big difference between the two is fermentation time. The small bottles ferment over the course of a few days until the pressure in the bottle kills off the yeast. The bigger batches ferment until all of the sugar is consumed, and is thus more alcoholic. So, if you make it in a big pail following the little batch instructions you get foul tasting, flat garbage, like I did. You see, the reason beer is fizzy is due to the “charging” of the bottles with sugar before you fill it up with your wort. Then the yeast makes more CO2, pressurizes the bottle and kills the yeast.
Of course, I didn’t charge the bottles, because I didn’t want the stuff to keep fermenting after bottled, because I wasn’t making beer. Little did I know, that I had, in fact, made beer due to my extra fermentation time. What I ended up with was something very yeasty with a profound taste of wintergreen and old bread. That was flat. And Lots of it. Four gallons, in fact. Our house has stank of that crap for the last week and a half.

On the bright side, I didn’t use the wrong yeast and then bottle in small batches, thus causing the bottles to rupture covering my kitchen with half fermented sugar and wintergreen. I suppose that would have been a true catastrophic failure.

Now, I’m not the sad individual that would get depressed over jacked up soda. (Okay, maybe I am.) However, I am an educator and my summer vacation is rapidly coming to an end, and I realized that I haven’t prepared for this coming fall, nor have I completed most of the projects I had in mind for my summer. Nothing like the weight of sloth to hold you down. I really like the cyclical processes that keep our lives in stagnation. I have loads of great ideas, but there is always something stupid in the way, usually the stupid thing is me. The other problem is how scattered my interests are, in case you couldn’t tell by the nature of Drunken Pumpkin, both Jeff and I suffer from an excess of things that draw our attention.

Ah well, enough of that nonsense, tune in next time, when I really will talk about junior crop circles. And sometime in the next week, images from our first foray into Bartitsu.

Back up singers: Beaker, Beaker, and Beaker
Drums: Beaker
Violin: Beaker