{"id":1119,"date":"2008-02-19T17:23:02","date_gmt":"2008-02-19T21:23:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/19\/en-passant\/"},"modified":"2008-03-31T23:22:29","modified_gmt":"2008-04-01T03:22:29","slug":"en-passant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/19\/en-passant\/","title":{"rendered":"En Passant"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve got a three-year-old arriving in half an hour, and I&#8217;ve got a remote controlled car that I&#8217;ve just assembled, so I don&#8217;t have a lot of time for blogging today. Let&#8217;s see how many of my 20 or so &#8220;quickies&#8221; I can get through, in passing, before she gets home&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Recent experiments with <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ernest_Hemingway\">Hemmingway<\/a>&#8216;s recipe for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.esquire.com\/drinks\/ernest-hemingway-drink-recipe\">Death In The Afternoon<\/a> produced some mixed results. Using <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/La_F%C3%A9e_Absinthe#La_F.C3.A9e_Absinthe_Parisienne\">Le Fee&#8217;s Parisian Absinthe<\/a> had the best visual results, and tasted OK. Using <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Absente\">Absente<\/a> was slightly less interesting visually, and tasted OK. Using <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/La_F%C3%A9e_Absinthe#La_F.C3.A9e_Absinth_Bohemian\">La Fee&#8217;s Bohemian Absinth<\/a> was much less exciting visually, since there was no <a href=\"http:\/\/www.absinthefever.com\/absinthe\/ritual\">louche<\/a> effect, but was a better taste to my palate due to the absence of much of the anise flavouring. (I wonder where I could get some of the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/La_F%C3%A9e_Absinthe#La_F.C3.A9e_Absinthe_X.E2.80.A2S_Fran.C3.A7aise\">X\u2022S Fran\u00e7aise<\/a> to try?) While I was only sipping, I have reports from at least three people&#8211;two of whom are well-nigh professional drinkers&#8211;of complete blackouts and mind-shattering hangovers, so apparently these things should be treated with caution.<\/li>\n<li>Bombarded from 35000 feet with&#8230; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbc.ca\/canada\/calgary\/story\/2008\/02\/07\/ice-roof.html?ref=rss\">frozen crap<\/a>? That puts a whole new meaning on &#8220;I smell a lawsuit coming&#8221;, doesn&#8217;t it?<\/li>\n<li>It should be no surprise to anyone who ever discussed TV with me that I&#8217;m a fan of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hbo.com\/thewire\/\">The Wire<\/a>&#8211;I&#8217;ve only been touting it for more than five years now&#8211;however, I hadn&#8217;t realized until just this week that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hbo.com\/thewire\/cast\/actors\/lance_reddick.shtml\">Lance Reddick<\/a>, a.k.a. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hbo.com\/thewire\/cast\/characters\/cedric_daniels.shtml\">Cedric Daniels<\/a>, a.k.a. Mr. NarrowWaist, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lancereddick.com\/index.htm\">describes himself as an actor <em>and<\/em> musician<\/a>. Or that he has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lancereddick.com\/musician\/music.htm\">a whole website devoted to his music<\/a>. Cedric Daniels doing <em>smoove<\/em> music&#8211;that&#8217;s some cognitive dissonance right there. It&#8217;s slightly more shocking than hearing the actors who play <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/name\/nm0252961\/\">Stringer<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/name\/nm0922035\/\">McNulty<\/a> talk in their real accents, that&#8217;s for sure.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.stevetastic.com\/\">Steve Murray<\/a> \/ <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chipstudio.com\/\">Chip Zdarsky<\/a> \/ &#8220;Jessica&#8221; cross-dresses, then <a href=\"http:\/\/network.nationalpost.com\/np\/blogs\/toronto\/archive\/2008\/02\/09\/steve-looks-like-a-lady.aspx\">does a comic about it<\/a> for the National Post. Why am I not surprised to see <a href=\"http:\/\/comics212.net\/\">Christopher Butcher<\/a> in the photos?<\/li>\n<li>Speaking of comics, I see that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.xkcd.com\/384\/\">XKCD<\/a> is addressing the Drake Equation, which <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2006\/12\/14\/the-drake-equation\/\">we discussed here<\/a> back in 2006.<\/li>\n<li>I can remember running early versions of <a href=\"http:\/\/povray.org\/\">POVRay<\/a> on my first DOS machine. It took days to render the 640&#215;480 scene of the mirrored sphere on the checkerboard table, but it was sure fun to play with. I&#8217;m surprised, and oddly pleased, to see that <a href=\"http:\/\/povray.org\/\">POVRay<\/a> is still kicking. The <a href=\"http:\/\/local.wasp.uwa.edu.au\/~pbourke\/exhibition\/scc5\/final.html\">results from the recent competition<\/a> to produce the coolest animations from source files less than 256 characters kind of blow my mind.<\/li>\n<li>I am really enjoying the new <a href=\"http:\/\/www.blackmountainarmy.com\/\">Black Mountain<\/a> album <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.ca\/Future-Black-Mountain\/dp\/B000ZIXGFS\">In The Future<\/a>. It&#8217;s a kind of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wolfmother.com\/\">Wolfmother<\/a>-meets-<a href=\"http:\/\/www.samrobertsband.com\/\">Sam Roberts<\/a> with more than a dash of old school <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Black_Sabbath\">Black Sabbath<\/a>, except performed by hippies-who-used-to-date-<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Neopaganism\">neopagans<\/a>, sound.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Oh, time for some base-board battering, let&#8217;s learn how to control an RC car action!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p class=\"excerpt\">I&#8217;ve got a three-year-old arriving in half an hour, and I&#8217;ve got a remote controlled car that I&#8217;ve just assembled, so I don&#8217;t have a lot of time for blogging today. Let&#8217;s see how many of my 20 or so &#8220;quickies&#8221; I can get through, in passing, before she gets home&#8230; Recent experiments with Hemmingway&#8216;s recipe for Death In The&hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/19\/en-passant\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,9,3],"tags":[31,246,459,229,155],"class_list":["post-1119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food-and-drink","category-music","category-technology","tag-comics","tag-drinking","tag-music","tag-the-wire","tag-webcomics","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-i3","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}