Spectre’s Sayings

This American take on a German hefeweizen is kind of interesting. It pours a dark golden color - a bit darker than your typical hefe, and the citrus aroma is quite subtle. So is the taste. It’s a really good beer, but shouldn’t be reserved only for the summer months. It makes a quite nice drink in the winter too! I’m liking it.

Blogging has been light as of late because I’m spending nearly every waking moment trying to get a roof over my head - literally. So far, the east and south sides have plywood and black paper. I had to go in to work this morning, and my body is incredibly sore. Especially my right wrist, for some reason.

Last week scientists gave 75:1 odds that asteroid 2007 WD5 would hit Mars next month. However, they revised those odds after a Ph.D. student went and looked at pictures of the sky where the asteroid had been before it had been discovered. He plotted its trajectory, and this new information allowed scientists to improve their calculations of the asteroids orbit and flight path. So, they now give 25:1 odds that there’s an asteroid impact in Mars’ future.

Read CBS News’ take on it here.

I received an unexpected gift from my employer today. It seems that they discovered a leak in the sprinkler system in the building, and scheduled some repairs done. So they closed the building at 10:00 am., and sent us all home. Yay! Went out to my house and spent the afternoon ridding the deck and basement of water, and helping my father put the 2×4’s at the ends of the truss overhang. It was cold and windy, but the worst part was all the mud that kept clinging to our shoes. Sometimes the mud held so strongly, I had to concentrate on not walking out of my shoes.

Tomorrow, we’re planning on putting the plywood up to form a roof. After which, we’ll put down the black paper, and then the shingles.

I’ve never seen so many snowmen in one place before. Outside of a Calvin & Hobbes comic strip, I mean.

Ian Anderson has, on numerous occasions, told the tale of how this song came to be. He lived in an apartment building one flight of stairs away from an aspiring classical guitarist. Now, this budding classical guitarist practiced Johann Sebastian Bach’s Bouree over and over and over and over, ad nauseum. And so, in order to have a bit of revenge, Ian took the song and turned it into an utterly loathsome piece of cocktail lounge jazz.

Oddly enough, it’s quite a likable tune, nonetheless.

Here’s a video from 1969 of Jethro Tull performing Bouree.

Now this is interesting: Japan mines “flammable ice,” flirts with environmental disaster.

Lifehack has an article called 10 Reasons Gift Certificates Make Horrible Gifts. The points are reasonable, even though the comments suggest that not all of them are valid.

Unfortunately, the bartender gave me a regular American-style pint glass instead of the recommended stemware or beer stein. However, this beer poured a deep, dark brown with a decent, creamy head. The mouth feel was very thick. It had an roasted-coffee aroma and a very complex taste. I couldn’t identify all the flavors swirling in my mouth. Rather than the expected hoppy finish at the rear of the mouth, there were tastes lingering further forward on my tongue. There was one flavor that was similar to, but not quite the same as, a sour taste that disagreed with me. But otherwise, it was a very well-balanced beer.

Although this lager hails from Germany, the creamy head and thick texture kept reminding me of various Irish dry stouts. If you like those types of beers (Guiness, Beamish) or the thicker varieties of Scottish Ales, you’d probably love this beer.

I wish all my readers a very Merry and Blessed Christmas

This is kind of an old story, but I just came across it. Seems that in China, the remains of an early mammal were found with its last meal still in its stomach … and that meal has been identified as a small dinosaur. Read the story here.

Christians begin to flock home to Baghdad now that al-Qaeda has been routed.

O Emmanuel, king and lawgiver, desire of the nations, Savior of all people, come and set us free, Lord our God.