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Ok, I might end up embarrassing myself on this one. But I’ll go ahead and put myself out there. I wanted to make mead but I wanted to do it in the laziest way possible… just to see how it goes. Maybe it will come out like crap. No fear.

It took me much longer to write this post than it did to actually make the mead.

Ingredients:

• 1/4 tsp of Red Star Premier Cuvee yeast from San Francisco Brewcraft
• 1/4 tsp of Yeast Nutrient made by Brewmaster of San Leandro, from San Francisco Brewcraft
• 1/4 tsp of Red Star Cote des Blancs yeast from San Francisco Brewcraft
• 3.7 lbs Raw Blackberry honey from Rainbow Grocery. $3.59/lb flower honey
• empty glass 1 gallon bottle (from this organic apple juice they have at Rainbow Grocery)
• empty 64 oz juice container from Trader Joes
• 1 gallon Crystal Geyser bottled water

What I did:

1. At the store, I put about 32 oz of bulk honey in a 64 oz container, total 3.7 lbs.
2. Last night in the kitchen I put 1 splash of bleach in the glass bottle and filled it with water. I let it sit for 20 minutes.
3. I emptied the glass bottle and filled it a couple times with tap water, swishing it around a bit
4. I poured a bit of the bottled water into the honey bottle and shook it around so the honey would flow out of the bottle better.
5. I poured the honey into the 1 gallon glass bottle and filled it to about 3/4 with bottled water.
6. I put 1/4 tsp of Yeast Nutrient in the glass bottle
7. I capped and shook the bottle for about 10 full seconds to mix it all up
8. I put 1/4 tsp of Premier Cuvee yeast in the bottle and shook it again
9. I stuck the rubber stopper and airlock on it (it didn’t fit well so I used lots of packing tape to attach it :-( )
10. I stuck it in the corner inside a plastic bucket (to catch any honey goo that comes out if it gets too bubbly)

Done

I had some leftover honey in the 64 oz container… I’m not sure how much because it was mixed with water… maybe 0.5 pounds. I filled the container with the rest of the bottled water, 1/4 tsp of nutrient (oop, I probably should have added 1/8 tsp) and 1/4 tsp of Cote des Blancs. I splashed it back and forth into the now-empty water bottle a few times to try and get more oxygen into it (I read in a couple places that helps) and stuck a stopper and air lock in it.

Both bottles are now sitting next to my bed.
Research time: 3+ hours
Actual preparation time: 15 minutes

We’ll see how it comes out in 6 months or so…

The sites I found most useful:

San Francisco Brewcraft, 1555 clement st, San Francisco, CA 94118 in the Richmond betw 16th & 17th Ave.  415-751-9338
http://www.otolith.com/howitt/mead.html
http://www.gotmead.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=14
http://www.doctorbeer.com/joyce/mead/BeesLees.txt

Trav makes some excellent commentary about government intervention after the Katrina hurricane.

for want of a heavy rain a few billion dollars were lost

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/us/05t…

many of the children of Hurricane Katrina are behind in school, acting out and suffering from extraordinarily high rates of illness and mental health problems. Their parents, many still anxious or depressed themselves, are struggling to keep the lights on and the refrigerator stocked.

Oh, good, a new victim class, ripe for dependency on the federal government, and the leftists who run it, and who profit from broken people and broken habits!

You know what the Germans were doing three years after we smashed their state, fire-bombed Dresden, and occupied their country?

They were rebuilding, and getting ready to become the best economy in Europe.

You know what the Japanese were doing three years after we burned Tokyo to the ground, nuked Hiroshima, nuked Nagasaki, and killed the better part of a generation of young men?

They were rebuilding, and getting ready to become the best economy in Asia.

You know what the residents of New Orleans are doing three years after it  rained  ?

Bitching, and moaning, and not accomplishing jack.

Ptooi.

For some, like Kearra Keys, 16, who was expelled from her Baton Rouge school for fighting and is now on a waiting list for a G.E.D. program, what was lost may be irretrievable.

I blame Bush.

More than 30,000 former trailer residents landed in apartments paid for by the federal government until March 2009,

WT* ?!?!?!?

I’m glad my tax dollars are paying for people so stupid that they lived below sea level to now live in taxpayer funded housing for four years.

I’ve read and heard several reports of people that were put into FEMA Katrina  relocation camps  trailer parks. Every report I heard was mind-bendingly bad. For example: suicide attempts at the parks are 79 times the national average.

Here is a local copy of the NPR radio  audio story, Stuck and Suicidal in a Post-Katrina Trailer Park. it’s 20 minutes long.

Here is a transcript excerpt.  

Look on the NPR website for more stories..  Stuck and Suicidal in a Post-Katrina Trailer Park

All Things Considered, August 8, 2007 · The first morning of my visit to Scenic Trails, I was walking the path between some trailers when I bumped into a man named Tim Szepek. He was young, tall, and solidly good-looking. I asked if I could speak to him for a moment and he agreed. We found a spot of shade beneath a tree, and I started with what I considered a casual warm-up.

“What’s it like to live around here?” I asked.

“Well,” he replied, “I’ll be honest.”

“Ain’t a day goes by when I don’t think about killing myself.”

And so began my time in Scenic Trails, a FEMA trailer park deep in the Mississippi woods where 100 families have lived in near isolation for close to two years.

Though Szepek was the first resident to tell me he wanted to commit suicide, he certainly wasn’t the last. The day I spoke with him, three other residents confided the same.

The second person was Stephanie Sigur, a 28-year-old mother of two. She was sitting in front of her trailer at a picnic table, her daughter on her lap, when she explained that if it weren’t a sin, she would have blown her brains out months ago.

“I know it’s a bad thing to say because I’m a parent,” she told me as her toddler played with her hair, “but I can’t live like this no more.”

Stephanie Sigur and Tim Szepek aren’t alone. According to a recent study of 92 different Katrina FEMA parks published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, suicide attempts in Louisiana and Mississippi’s parks are 79 times higher than the national average. Major depression is seven times the national rate.

When I first read those numbers, I found them hard to believe. But after three days at Scenic Trails, they made a lot more sense.

The residents there, in essence, are trapped. It is no longer possible for them to live outside the trailer parks. Prior to Katrina, most of the people who now live in the parks were renters.

Along the Mississippi coast, a family of four could rent a two- or three-bedroom apartment or small home for around $500 a month. But when the storm wiped the Mississippi coast clean, it took out all the housing infrastructure that supported these people. Most of them are minimum-wage workers who live paycheck to paycheck. Today, a two- or three-bedroom apartment in Hancock County, where Scenic Trails is located, costs $800, $900, even $1,000 a month. This is an impossible amount of money for the people who live in the parks, and there is no immediate end in sight. FEMA says it would like to close the parks, but state and federal government plans to rebuild low-income housing for Mississippi coast residents have yet to break ground. Housing experts says it will probably take years to produce enough low-cost housing to move people out of the parks.

And so they are stuck. And the place they are stuck is not the kind of place you would want to spend an extended amount of time. For two years, many have lived in travel trailers intended for weekend use. Families of four housed in a space the size of most people’s living rooms.

Worse, as time wears on, the communities around them seem to be falling into a kind of madness. At Scenic Trails, almost everyone at the camp has been burglarized at least once. Meth and cocaine addiction is rampant, and residents seem to be turning against one another.

Recently, the park has seen a rash of animal mutilations. One resident told me that her cat had come home bleeding – a long, thin razor cut along its leg. Another resident said his dog’s throat had been cut, and several people reported that someone in the camp had been feeding anti-freeze to dogs.

No one seemed to have a particular suspect in mind. There was no specific theory of why. That was just the way things went at the camp nowadays. With no way to leave, people were angry and frustrated, and so they act out.

On the animals. On each other. On themselves.

The government is not helping by “helping”.

SWARM and I went to Coachella 2008. I just wanted to note someplace who actually played Coachella…

Friday April 25th
Jack Johnson
the Verve
the Raconteurs
the Breeders
Aphex Twin
Fatboy Slim
Tegan and Sara
Serj Tankian
Goldfrapp
the Swell Season
the National
Slightly Stoopid
Mum
Pendulum
Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings
Battles
Aesop Rock
Les Savy Fav
Midnight Juggernauts
Spank Rock
dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip
Diplo
Redd Kross
Adam Freeland
Santogold
Jens Lekman
John Butler Trio
Vampire Weekend
Dan Deacon
SebastiAn
Black Kids
Architecture in Helsinki
Sandra Collins
Busy P
Cut Copy
Black Lips
Datarock
Professor Murder
Porter
Rogue Wave
American Bang
Luckyiam  

Saturday April 26
Continue reading ‘Who Played Coachella 2008’ »

Simulated Comic Product has this on robots.

I pledge to not let this happen to my beloved SWARM orbs!

(click for full-size comic product)