The Secret Lair

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This week, I was a guest on the Living Proof Brew Cast, hosted by John Taylor Williams and Thomas Gideon.  Their show notes are replicated below:

Before we got into the thirsty work of my recent trip update, we poured and discussed our beers for the evening. As a foreshadowing on our main topic with Chris, he had a St. Peters Sorghum Beer. The beers John and I enjoyed were a good introduction to my thoughts on Brussels. John had the New Belgium 1554 and I had the New Belgium Trippel. Both ales reminded me strongly of the many beers–dubbels, trippels, blonds, brunes–that I enjoyed every day during my week in Belgium.

The reason for my trip, a business trip, was the EU Hackathon. Some of you may have seen the video I sharedthe really captured the spirit of the event. My Untappd stream reflected almost all of the beers I had while abroad. The highlight of my trip was definitely Moeder Lambic, the one at Place Fontainas. Not only was there an amazing profusion of beers on offer but beer culture is definitely in the very DNA of this establishment. The photos from the very end of the set on my Flickr account are from this venue.

From early on in my trip, I shared how I learned what Belgians consider a black ale versus what we call a black beer here in the states. This experience was from Cafe Leffe and the beer in question was the Westmalle Abbey Dubbel. The 1554, which is very close to the black, or more accurately brown, ales reminded John of another New Belgium, Snow Day, that he had recently.

The best beer of the trip, bar none, a beer that still haunts me was the Val-Dieu Grand Cru. This is a specialty beer, on researching it, from the Abbey du Val-Dieu which may make it hard to find either through an online or a local retailer or importer. The top spot of this beer is saying something considering some of the others I had at Moeder Lambic like the Cantillon Rose du Gambrinus, a two year old framboise lambic, and the Kerkom Winterkoninkske. Bret, our friend and the brewmaster at Growlers, recommended checking with his friends atHalftime Beverage.

One of the other beers I had on the trip, a 12 year old Trappist ale, has just been announced as coming to the states.

Speaking of travel, Chris shared his thoughts on his travel plans for the coming year. He is thinking of trying to head out some place interesting at least once a month. Ideally 2012 will see some great reports from the field by him as well as another brew day with accompanying social time to hang out, relax, and catch up in person.

The subject of brewing with Chris again segued us into a brewing update from him. He shared his thoughts on a pale ale he made and several instructive failures from his experimentations since he last collaborated with us in the beer kitchen. The pale ale, a Bells Two Hearted clone from TastyBrew.com, sounded like a challenging beer while young but may be aging out to something very special, what John dubbed a “hop wine.” The impetus for an experiement so heavily hopped was 10oz of home grown hops from a friend of Chris’. John offered that the experience with this beer was very similar to his with the Green Grass and High Tides.

We ended up chatting a bit about what we’ll be brewing next. As fun as the idea of The Mongrel was, I think John and I want to put the Summer of protest beer behind us and return to familiar responses and new experiments. We are due to brew in my kitchen next. I want to tackle a recipe we tasted and discussed in our triangulation episodes, the Sun-Dial in the Shade Oatmeal Stout.

Chooch told us how to cheer in China, in both Mandarin and Cantonese.

We turned to the reason we invited Chris on, a discussion of gluten free beers and brewing. Chris shared his experiences and impressions from about half a month so far of drinking only gluten free beers. He reminded us why he is doing this for the month of November. In addition to the St. Peter”s he mentioned at the outset, Chris has also tried RedBridge, Lakefront New Grist, and Bard’s.

John has mentioned William Davis’ “Wheat Belly” before, when we were ruminating on the effectiveness of Evo’s brew diet. He brought it up again as being relevant to why wheat may cause some people grief even in the absence of celiac or an actual allergy. Chris offered a similar read that provokes thought around food culture and industry, “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan. In addition to reading and research, Chris is taking a very considered approach that includes journaling his experiences and impressions.

Bolstering the idea that there are unexplored flavors beyond wheat and barley, John had the Great Divide Samurai, a rice beer that definitely compares well to any beer, gluten free or otherwise. He has also brewed with rye and is a fan of its presence in spirits. Basic Brewing Radio had a fantastic episode on gluten free brewing that delved in the flavors available from these ingredients. Search for Desiree Knott of High Gravity in Tulsa to find the episode in question. All three of us are great fans of everything James and company do on that podcast.

Chris explained the thought behind the name he decided to brew under, Speculative Brewing, that captures the adventurous and experimental spirit he brings to brewing. If you want more from Chris specific to beer, check out his recent review of pumpkin ales. He is planning a similar review in December of Christmas and holiday ales. Feel free to participate in the conversastions around both pieces by contributing your thoughts on a related beer in the comments. John or I will add a comment with our impressions of Flying Dog’s The Fear, an outstanding and unusual local pumpkin beer. You can expand the beers Chris is able to review by donating and sending him something local or regional near you. That holds true if you want John and I to try something on mic. Either way, feel free to contact us for details of how to get us beers.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:13:11 — 83.8MB)

Today, The Secret Lair presents…Escape Pod #25, a particularly wonderful story about the madness of the Elder Ones on Hallowmas Eve…

The Great Old Pumpkin

By John Aegard.
Read by Stephen Eley. Music by Toby Chappell.

As you are no doubt aware, I am the issue of solid Dutch stock‚ the prosperous Van Pelt family of St. Paul. Mine was a comfortable and happy childhood, and I spent much of it in the devoted service of the Great Old Pumpkin. For him, I cultivated an annual pumpkin patch. I also evangelized him in the community, relating the tale of how, every year on Hallowmas Eve, the day when the spiritual most strongly encroaches on the substantial, this mightiest of gourds would rise to revel across the world with the most sincere of his adorers. My neighbors were understandably skeptical; after all, not once had this superbeing ever chosen to grace my pumpkin patch or any other place in our town. I vowed that I would coax him into my backyard, and I set out in the manner of a learned man to discover how I might do this.

Rated PG. Contains dark imagery and terrifying fruit.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:44 — 23.6MB)

Fables of the Flying City is the tale of Ashe, a young woman from the streets of the flying city of Amperstam learns what it takes to be a member of the Aerial Guard, and finds herself at war with an invading empire and the rulers of the city she has sworn to protect!

Fables of the Flying City is written by Jared Axelrod, with illustrations by Steve Walker and Natalie Kelly.

About Jared Axelrod

In addition to writing the adventures of Ashe and the other denizens of the flying city of Amperstam, Jared Axelrod is the writer of the webcomic “All Write!” for the website I Should Be Writing. His written work has been published in the anthologies Podthology: The Pod Complex, as well as The Sovereign Era: Year One, Salt and End Of Time, as well asNeometropolis and Escape Pod magazines. He was a founding writer for 365 Tomorrows. His illustration work can be seen on the cover of the novel Brave Men Run, and accompanying the original audio version of the novels Playing For Keeps and Cybrosis. He currently resides in Philadelphia with his immensely talented wife.

He is not domestic, he is a luxury. And in that sense, necessary.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:12 — 29.5MB)

J.C. Hutchins is an award-winning fiction and nonfiction storyteller, with 15 years of professional writing experience.  His two novels – 7th Son: Descent and Personal Effects: Dark Art — were published in 2009 by St. Martin’s Press.

Hutchins is a successful New Media storytelling pioneer and marketer, best known for his innovative use of written fiction, podcasting, video and fan-fueled crowdsourcing to create thriller stories, which he distributes online.  With more than 5 million episodic downloads of his fiction to date, Hutchins is one of the most popular “podcast novelists” in the world.  His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR’s Weekend Edition, Fast Company, Starlog, the BBC, Time.com, AdWeek.com, Wired.com UK, and BoingBoing.net.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:50 — 30.1MB)

The zombie apocalypse.  Many have written about it, visualized it, studied it, but only the mind of J.R. Blackwell could create a live game pitting live humans against zombies in real life settings. Listen now to Overlord Miller’s interrogation of  the lovely Ms. Blackwell about her new game, the mechanics within, and the Kickstarter project to get it all started. The Secret Lair presents: Shelter In Place.

Related articles

• J.R. Blackwell – Bringing Zombies to the Masses (blogher.com)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:28 — 18.7MB)

CC BY-NC-ND image from sheiladeeisme via Flickr

What’s that sound pulsing in the back of your head? That thrumming vibration that invokes images of both machinations and science in your mind? Yes, The Lair’s transmitters are online, and a fresh podcast episode is available! In this edition, Overlord Miller and The Bad Doctor Cmar have brought Dr. Pamela Gay to the Interrogation Chamber, wherein she spills many secrets about science education, her new project Icehunters, and our future space prospects at the end of the shuttle era:

• Dr. Gay discusses both the Slacker Astronomy Podcast and the Astronomy Cast
• The Bad Doctor giggles appropriately at the star Tau Boo B
• Dr. Gay gives props to her Astronomy Cast co-host Fraser Cain and his astronomy news site Universe Today
• It is noted that Dr. Gay has enough street cred to make Wikipedia, as well as show up on television in a couple of episodes of The Universe
• Dr. Gay discusses science education and outreach, including how she views astronomy as a “gateway drug” for science
• New media enables Dr. Gay to play with the coolest kids on the internet while living in the mosquito-infested, groundhog terrorized Midwestern United States
• Dr. Gay has a grant proposal with Moon Ranger Laura to go to conventions and do guerrilla astronomy
• Icehunters is Dr. Gay’s new project, which is essentially crowd sourced space exploration that anyone can participate in online, to both determine a destination for the New Horizons probe and to discover new objects
• We have a flashback to the original heady days of SETI@home
• Dr. Gay mentions the upcoming Planetary Investigators citizen science project from the Space Telescope Science Institute
• Educators should contact Dr. Gay for lesson plans and educational materials: starstryder AT gmail.com
• Dr. Gay notes that Elon Musk could be the next great hope for space exploration in the post-shuttle era via SpaceX, which might be related to the launch of a wheel of cheese as a human weight analogue (internal Lair memo: Minister Lynn, why haven’t we done this yet?), or possibly out-competing China
• Dr. Gay recommends the following for staying abreast of science news: Universe Today, the Planetary Society blog, NPR’s Radiolab audio program, and Scientific American
• We like Dr. Gay, and may keep her in our Menagerie. Even if we set her free, you can find her website here and her Twitter feed here, and should sign up for Icehunters here.

We welcome your adulation, your tribute, and your comments below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:12 — 37.7MB)

At last, we’re back with a new podcast episode. In this bundle of joy:

• We hold a board meeting to reveal just what that bacon smell was in the Lair, and discuss the fate of Overlord Johnson…
• We relate what we’re currently reading…
• Natalie is reading [amazon_link id="0765328542" target="_blank" container="" container_class="" ]Fuzzy Nation[/amazon_link] by John Scalzi
• Dr. Cmar is reading [amazon_link id="0972595961" target="_blank" container="" container_class="" ]Warlords of Utopia [/amazon_link]by Lance Parkin
• Chris just finished [amazon_link id="344254193X" target="_blank" container="" container_class="" ]Cryptonomicon[/amazon_link] by Neal Stephenson and is currently reading [amazon_link id="0470395354" target="_blank" container="" container_class="" ]Schneier on Security[/amazon_link] by Bruce Schneier
• David has read a Great Many Things, but saw Cars 2 recently.
• We discuss Medical Studies for Non-Medical Personnel with Dr. John Cmar, mainly, how do you tell a Good Medical Study from a Bad Medical Study (hint…the Good Medical Study does not necessarily appear in a bubble of light wearing sequins. That would be too easy.)

We welcome your adulation, your tribute, and your comments below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 52:02 — 47.6MB)

Shows like this had multiple seasons, and SG:U gets cancelled? Poppycock.

I ask you: is the age of Sci-Fi television dead? And if so, who killed it?

I can think of two culprits off the top of my head: Fox and SyFy¹. Let’s take a look at each station’s criminal acts:

Fox

Firefly. Need I say more?

Actually, yes, I do. While the unfathomable, deliberate killing of Firefly by the 可惡的老暴君² Fox has left a scar on the soul of countless Sci-Fi geeks out there, the network has other recriminations. Two more Sci-Fi programs have died early deaths by their hand in the last few years, namely Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Dollhouse. I find it to be a happy miracle that Fringe has lasted this long; maybe they’ve learned their lesson.³

SyFy⁴

After their extreme luck in obtaining Battlestar Galactica⁵ and after wringing the life out of the Stargate franchise, this network has squandered its momentum by filling its airtime with reality paranormal crap, reruns and professional wrestling.⁶ It gave both Stargate: Universe and Caprica a whopping half a season each before sending them to the chopping block. Granted, Caprica was a bit… sleepy, and SG:U suffered (rightly or no) from accusations of similarity to BSG and dissimilarity to the rest of the Stargate franchise, but they both deserved more of a chance than they got. Maybe the forthcoming BSG: Blood and Chrome will lead somewhere. It’d be nice to see some Vipers in the air again.

Gone, it seems, are the days when a station would foster an audience, let a show develop and watch it flourish. Now, if something isn’t a hit within its first two shows, it faces a dubious future. Can you imagine if Star Trek: The Next Generation had been made in more recent times? It would never have seen a third season, and maybe not a second. The late 80′s and into the mid 90′s were something of a modern Golden Age of Sci-Fi television: three Star Trek series, Andromeda, Space: Above and Beyond, a Twilight Zone reboot, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., and even crap like Time Trax and Tek War, made for a smorgasbord of geeky viewing.⁷ As a fan of Sci-Fi both good and bad, I fear we may never see its like again.

And why might this be? Two reasons, I think.

First may be the prevalence of television shows on DVDs and streaming video. The convenience of watching something on one’s own time, without having to try and remember to record something or – gods forbid – actually watch something when it’s on, has destroyed the television model that’s been set in stone for ages, and the networks have found it nearly impossible to catch up with the times. They still rely on feeble, outdated Nielsen-style ratings, hoping that somehow people will come back to the old model of TV, where they could confidently sell ad time, knowing that people would be actually watching the ads to some degree. Seriously, when’s the last time you watched a commercial on purpose, other than during the Super Bowl? Executives are quick to blame the audience for not supporting the shows they like, but the reality is that the masses have moved into the future, whereas the industry, in the main, has not.

The second reason may be found in the exponential rise of the home video game console, both in numbers and in quality. Why watch some static TV program, when you can be immersed in the story, taking out bad guys and solving the underlying mystery yourself? The Half-Life game series by Valve is an excellent example of this: being Dr. Freeman is just as engaging as watching any great Sci-Fi series. Not to mention, all those myriad achievements taunting you, unattained. For those who have the skill – and the time – there is no comparison; I’ll take the gravity gun over the TV remote every time.

1. egad– typing that in that spelling still makes me want to gag [↩]
2. Ke3 wu4 de5 lao3 bao4 jun1– “Horrible old tyrant” [↩]
3. Not bloody likely. [↩]
4. again, the retching [↩]
5. after NBC passed on it [↩]
6. seriously, wrestling? WTF SyFy? [↩]
7. I would have included Cleopatra 2525 in this list, but I learned that, according to Wikipedia, it didn’t run until 2000, which surprised me for some reason [↩]

This is the topic sentence of the witty show notes. This is a followup, carrying the joke forward.

• This is something we talked about.
• This is the revelation that Overlord Miller has returned.
• This is something witty Overlord Johnson said
• This is Kingfish’s befuddled retort
• This is Cmar’s comment about ladies of the evening and his chosen profession.

This is our wrap-up line, end up the witty show notes and reminding you that our theme music is “Skullcrusher Mountain” by Jonathan Coulton.

Oh, and we talked about Kindles, iPads, and Android Tablets, too. It’s a neat show. You should listen. Honest.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:13 — 40.5MB)

What you need to know about Episode 0041: In 3-D!

• Overlord Miller: frozen in carbonite. We’re working on getting him out of there. Really.
• We should have talked about Con on the Cob and The Dead Games Society, but we didn’t. Look for a more in-depth discussion of both on a future episode.
• We discuss (among other things) Frosted Flakes and 3-D movies.
• This week’s promo: The Zombie Podcast. Braaaaaains!

Overlord Johnson and a fine group of manly men (including someone who bears an uncanny resemblance to Overlord Miller—weird) are once again growing crackling virility hedges for breast cancer research. Please visit Beards4Boobs.org or the How Not To Grow a Beard Month website to witness the spectacle and sponsor a beard.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:18:40 — 72.0MB)