Good evening, Kibitzers!
In theory, between the time I write this and the time you read it, I will have gotten my second Moderna shot. I am prepared to feel like crap after it, but not instantly, I hope. My plan is to do as I did last time, which was, go home in such a way as to pass the nice Italian supermarket, and stop there to pick up some comforting prepared foods for a couple of days’ lunches and suppers (plus a small treat from the pastry counter for being a good girl). Last time I went, they had fabulous arancini the size of softballs, one of which makes a great lunch, so I am hoping to see those again.
[Update: Got the shot, got the arancini, feeling okay so far but it’s early yet.]
The other part of my plan is to make myself a drink when I get home. I know we’re not out of the woods by any means, but as many here have observed before, it really feels like a big fucking deal to have even the first shot, so I am expecting to wish to celebrate the second.
I came nowhere near exhausting YouTube’s supply of videos that satisfy our curiosity about how various adult beverages come to be. This is just sort of a survey course, but it seemed appropriate for the day. I raise a glass to relief, and to the hope everyone can soon be protected.
Let’s start with beer, as many of us do. This video takes a more scientific approach than most of those I have here. [6:45]
I was trying to stay away from the ones where grandpa shows you how to make wine at home… [8:50]
As I never tire of saying, I thought I didn’t like Champagne, until I got on the train to Paris. They were coming around with trays of it, of course, and I thought well, I’m on a train to Paris, what the hell. I immediately learned that what I didn’t like is whatever they pour in wedding-reception halls in New Jersey. Champagne is fucking awesome. [4:24]
Before we start distilling, let’s look at hardware. Or not so hard, in the case of corks. [4:06]
Barrels kind of bridge the gap between wine and whiskey. [15:37]
My favorite line here is “Production continues there with the approval of Congress.” Yeah, no doubt. [5:06]
This narration is certainly synthetic speech, imo, with text written by someone who is not a native English speaker. Its accent is an interesting choice, but without better inflection, it’s not fooling anyone. Obviously, this has nothing to do with the information about vodka. [8:18]
Alton Brown explains why gin and tonic is medicine. [4:57]
I personally had no idea about this tequila process. Wow. [5:04]
I love Lagavulin. It smells like dirt, in a good way. On Islay, they’d call it “peaty”, but they mean it smells like dirt. [10:33, minus the 1:04 of Johnnie Walker ads I peeled off the front.]
To finish up here, Bon Appétit rounds up ten chefs to show how to make their favorite drinks. [18:19]
Actually, music to finish up. Paste your drinking-themed tunes in the comments, please — I certainly can’t stuff them all in this diary! Also, your other comments, drink recipes, and in fact, random utterances are also welcome, because that’s how we roll here. [4:42]
At the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute, Wembley Stadium 1988. [5:34]
At the 1993 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductions, then-surviving members of The Doors play with Eddie Vedder. [5:41]
My sincere apologies to those who cannot consume alcohol, for boring you with all this. I’d urge you to get back at me by booking a KTK diary and writing about, say, halvah or tahini, two preparations that just taste like fire to me, and not in a good way. [2:19]
Today’s Political and Other Short Subjects:
The Meidas Touch would like to remind Dan Crenshaw (R-TX-02) about an earlier comment he’s conveniently forgotten. [0:45]
The Parody Project has a song about that pillow guy, to the tune of Tit-Willow, from Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado. [3:30]
Founders Sing, on the other hand, is going with Albert Einstein singing a Temptations tune, because why not? [3:11]
I had something else in this spot, and then Jon Batiste (with Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails) won the Oscar for Best Original Score for the Pixar film Soul, which also won Best Animated Feature. For my money, the CBS This Morning interviewers could shut up just a little more, but Jon does get to talk and it’s lovely to hear what he says. [5:00]
It’s not that an 18-second video of someone petting a duck is that remarkable. It’s just that I really like the title it’s been given: Epic Duck Just Vibing. [0:18]
This is a “Yay, New Jersey” piece from a few weeks ago, wherein frogs and salamanders are assisted across the road to vernal pools. Note that we are speaking of amphibians here — some are long, but everything here has legs. [3:21]
Stay safe! 💙💙💙💙💙
🌟 Democracy Docket 🌟
The Democracy Docket website, founded by formidable our-side attorney Marc Elias, carries breaking news about current election law, more in-depth articles, and, always, information plus all available legal documents (as PDFs) about every active election law case.
Marc Elias and Democracy Docket on Twitter are good sources of current news about election law, including all the voter-suppression crap coming up. You can subscribe to the Democracy Docket email newsletter here to get the latest updates. Democracy Docket also has a YouTube channel.
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We have come to the point where Chef José Andrés’ worldwide relief organization is so ubiquitous that I’m just giving it its own box here. I can’t even link all the places they’re working. They’re feeding people who need meals wherever they find them, for whatever reason and by whatever means, including supporting local restaurants by contracting with them for meals. Pretty much every tab at that website will tell you something amazing.
You can always donate or volunteer at their website, but it may not be up on the very latest news. For that, check Twitter for Chef Andrés and for World Central Kitchen.
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Please see Denise Oliver Velez’s diary for information on, and ways to help, the Caribbean island of St. Vincent and the nearby islands where people are currently threatened by a dangerous volcanic eruption.
It has been 1,315 DAYS SINCE HURRICANE MARIA MADE LANDFALL IN PUERTO RICO ON SEPTEMBER 20, 2017.
As federal money begins to flow, so many problems have built up, due to various natural disasters, drought, Covid as a pandemic and with its economic impacts, it’s not the case that a big pile of cash is just going to fix everything there. At the root of the problem is racism; what a surprise. It’s easy for wealthy colonizers to loot a place when there aren’t many people who care what happens there. It’s… kind of a pattern.
Since no one can snap their fingers and declare the problem solved, this box is now tracking reports from Denise Oliver-Velez. To learn more about what’s going on there, her Twitter feed and Daily Kos comments are good starting points.
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🦠 COVID-19 🧫
Missing some past entry? My past diaries list, where the older purple boxes still live.
NEW: In the latest SciShow video, host Rose Bear Don't Walk* (Salish/Crow; Yale ‘16) discusses how mRNA vaccines actually work and why they’re not able to change our DNA as some fear . See also their playlist of Covid updates on what we’re learning.
*This is a complete digression from Covid, but Hank Green’s been hosting the Covid news segments himself, so I was interested when this young woman showed up instead, and the more so when I read her name. It turns out the Bear Don’t Walk family is a distinguished one, and she is bent on making a difference for her Salish community. The thing I turned up about her that I liked best was her jingle dress dance for hope.
NEW: @AhsanteB’s interview with Dr. Bisola Ojikutu of the Harvard School of Public Health answers a lot of questions that the vaccine-hesitant or curious might be thinking. It’s a good presentation, obviously aimed at the Black community but informative to anyone.
Anyway! Variants: 🦠 Dr. Fauci talks with Seth Meyers about the new virus variants and how much danger they pose. 🦠 A video from the Wall Street Journal (whose news division, remember, is good) goes into more and geekier detail about how the variants work. 🦠 A Vox video reviews how smallpox was eradicated, and discusses the roadblocks to fighting Covid in the same ways.
NEW: This video is not specific to Covid, but offers a fairly simple account of how our immune system works.
NEW articles: The Atlantic has listed their ongoing virus coverage here, and none is behind a paywall. They add new articles often, including these two: The Rural Pandemic Isn’t Ending, and The Blood-Clot Problem Is Multiplying.
xaxnar’s diary (with its comment thread) discusses neurological impacts seen in “long-haul” Covid sufferers. wilderness voice’s KosAbility diary (and comment thread) offer further discussion of long Covid, its symptoms, and their relationship to ME/CFS.
This tweet by Joseph Allen links to a NY Times visual presentation about how we can change the airflow in classrooms to make it safer. There’s also a link from there to an Instagram “augmented reality” classroom visit.
The Washington Post is maintaining this page that tracks vaccine arrival and distribution state by state. Note this is NOT paywalled.
This virus spread tracking site also has an excellent “wiki” page on virus information/misinformation, proper mask use, symptoms, etc. h/t eeff!
This excellent video explains clearly how viruses are killed by washing with soap. h/t Sara R!
A doctor shows how to quickly alter a disposable mask to get a safer fit.
CDC chart shows how to remove gloves properly to avoid contamination.
The lung exercises in this diary are still good for anyone, sick or not.
[Sara R and winglion have suspended taking orders for masks while Sara is recovering from her surgery. If you hear they’re able to take orders again before I do, you can find their links in my past diaries.]
PALM BEACH (The Borowitz Report)—Unsparing in his criticism of the President, Donald J. Trump blasted Joe Biden for firing almost no one in his first hundred days. [snip]
In another alleged failure of Biden’s first hundred days, Trump ripped the President for having picked “no fights whatsoever” with TV celebrities.
“It’s almost like he doesn’t even watch TV,” Trump said. “What does he do all day?”
— The Borowitz Report, at The New Yorker
This Week in Boredom:
- NASA News: The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter made its third flight on Sunday, flying 50 meters and back (In the video, it starts at the lower left, ascends and flies to the right out of Percy’s field of vision, then returns and lands). Its second flight produced the first aerial color image of Mars. ✨ Perseverance, meanwhile, busied itself extracting oxygen from the Mars atmosphere, the first step in exploring whether human crews on Mars could be supplied with oxygen for extended missions.
- Meteor Shower Calendar, 2021-22.
- Astronomy Picture of the Day: A dramatic animated video shows how a star is shredded by a black hole. ✨ Also this week: Centaurus A is a pair of colliding galaxies; this image shows how the magnetic fields are twisted by the collision. ⭐ An ISS image of the earth’s day/night terminator shows the gradual darkening of twilight. ⭐ And an ISS video of earth at night shows auroras and lightning storms.
- Live cam: This pretty little woodland brook cam with bird and animal visitors is in Denmark, where it’s 6 hours ahead of Eastern Time, 9 ahead of Pacific.
- Zooniverse: Prompted by a Mark Sumner diary, we took up with a website called Zooniverse, in search of new research projects that ordinary people can help with by doing relatively time-intensive tasks like transcribing, sorting, and classifying. They’re typically tasks that are not very hard for people, but too subtle for AI. Mark's diary can give you a sense of the kinds of things available to participate in. 📖 Here’s one: Sedimental Values: Digging In to La Brea’s Past. At La Brea Tar Pits, paleontologists have been excavating fossils for decades, and have kept detailed records on paper of exactly how each piece is situated before removing it, allowing relationships among items to be preserved. They need help transcribing details in these records to computer, to make the information available to scientists everywhere.
- Smithsonian Online Exhibition: Objects and artworks representing the year 1977, from the collections of various Smithsonian museums.
- Tasting History: Join Max Miller as he explores the history of food, including some ancient recipes. Today, he makes Galyntyne Sauce from England’s first cookbook, The Forme of Cury, and discusses royal cuisine in the reign of teenage King Richard II.
- Individual coffee-mug cake substitute: We’re waiting for a new mug cake; our stand-in this week is an individual mug snack. Craving pizza in the dead of night but don’t have any? You can whip up this mug “pizza” that microwaves in 90 seconds.
- Time machine: Edison Lighthouse perform Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes), Top of the Pops, May 2, 1970.
- Obama White House video: In May 2016, President Obama greets the NCAA champion UConn women’s basketball team and receives a gift.
- Ukulele Duet: Okay, this is not a duet. But I could not pass up a chance to bring you the redoubtable Thomas Benjamin Wild Esq performing Tom Lehrer’s Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.
- The Frick Collection’s “Cocktails with a Curator”: Discussion of Whistler’s Harmony in Pink and Gray: Portrait of Lady Meux. Lady Meux was the wife of Sir Henry Bruce Meux, heir to a brewery fortune; she was a former actress and bartender, and on those grounds, rejected by people who, apparently groundlessly, styled themselves “polite society”. This week’s complementary cocktail is the Mummy, inspired by her notable collection of Egyptian artifacts. (New videos in this series post at 5 pm ET on Fridays, with the week’s cocktail recipe posted in advance. They run around 15-20 minutes.)
- The Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto came under discussion in a recent KTK. They have some extremely fabulous collections. Of course they are still closed due to Covid, but like many larger museums, they are presenting items from their collection online, a new one every other week. The latest exhibit shows how some beautiful Tlingit moccasins were conserved before being loaned out to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
- The Metropolitan Opera is still streaming free operas daily. YOU CAN ALSO attend special 75-minute livestream concerts for which you must buy a $20 ticket. The livestream occurs at a certain time, but is available for ticketholders to view (and re-view) at any time in the ensuing two weeks. The next concert is Wagnerians in Concert, livestreaming May 8, featuring sopranos Christine Goerke and Elza van den Heever, tenor Andreas Schager, and baritone Michael Volle, singing Wagner and Strauss. There’s further information at the link about how it works. The Met does not plan to re-open physically until September 2021. The entire 2020-21 season, through June, is very wisely canceled.
- New York City Center, not to be outdone, is offering a streaming concert tomorrow, April 28: Bring Me to Light, starring Sutton Foster and featuring fellow Broadway stars Raúl Esparza, Joaquina Kalukango, Kelli O’Hara, and Wren Rivera, performing favorites from musical theater. A $35 ticket allows you to view the show as often as you like through May 31.
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