Almost Out The Door

I hope everyone had a good Easter weekend.  I'm about to head off to sunny Granada for a few days, for a very important research trip which definitely won't involve drinking any Alhambra beer out in the sun.  I should have been going yesterday, of course, but after six years of international travel I suppose I was about due for one of those "We've chucked you off your flight because we can and also fuck you" emails that are so much fun to read less than a week before your departure.

Anyway, expect very light blogging until next week.  To keep you going, here (via Balloon Juice) is a video of a baby penguin being tickled.  Chemie may need oxygen after this.

A Tale Of Cocktails: These Are The New Facts

Top Ten

1.     Brain Hemmorhage
2.     Fuzzy Shark
3.     Choc Berry
=4.   Baby Guiness
=4.   Dennis the Menace
6.     Malibu Pop
=7.   Angel Delight
=7.   Kir Royale
=7.   After Six
=10. Ume Royale
=10. Midori Sour

Worst Cocktail

Champagne Cocktail

Statistics

Mean = 6.80
Median = 6.8
Range = 3.1
Standard deviation = 0.70

Histogram

(Not too far from normally distributed, is it?)

Supplies Consumed

Booze

Advocaat
Amaretto
Blue Curacao
Brandy
Chambord
Champagne
Creme de Cassis
Creme de Menthe
Elderflower liquor
Gin
Irish Cream (Baileys)
Kahlua
Malibu
Midori
Peach Schnapps
Plum wine
Port
Rum (dark)
Sloe Gin
Tia Maria
Triple Sec
Vodka

Mixers

Bitters
Cocoa
Cranberry Juice
Cream
Grenadine
Lemon Juice
Lemonade
Lime Cordial
Milk
Orange Juice
Pineapple Juice
Sugar
Vanilla syrup

Garnish

Cherry
Chocolate
Lemon
Marshmallow
Mint Matchmaker
Orange
Whipped cream
A shark

Glasses

Champagne
Cocktail
Collins
Cordial
Highball
Shot

Estimated amount of ice used: 305 cubic centimetres.

Friday Talisman: Ser Nathan

Another knight for the realm of Talisman, and this one has rather more flesh on his bones. 

Actually, he reminds me a little of regular commentor BigHead.  Something about the jawline, I think.

The whole gang:

A Tale Of Cocktails #26

Midori Sour 

Ingredients

1 oz genadine syrup

3 oz Midori

2 oz lemon juice

Taste: 9

Look: 8

Cost: 6
Name: 4
Prep: 6
Alcohol: 3
Overall: 6.8

Preparation:  Pour the Grenadine into a sugar-rimmed collins glass.  Layer on the Midori, and then the lemon juice on top of that.

General Comments: Remember when you were a kid, and eating Skittles one at a time just wasn't excitin' enough, and you stuffed every different flavour into your mouth at the same time and began clumsily masticating your way though a giant grainy ball of tangled flavours?  This is like that, only with added sugar, because God knows, that's what Skittles needed.

Also, there's alcohol.  Delicious!  On the other  hand, that's not much of an inventive name, and it's a pain to prepare (I've really not got the hang of this layering business).  It's a bit expensive too, though if you're OK with that, it's worth it in the end.

"Remove Your Clothes In The Name Of Freedom!"

Via LGM, an excellent article which nails down something that's been hanging nebulously around my synapses for a while: what Harcourt calls the difference between police-state logic and political-state logic.  To simplify a great deal, police-state logic assumes that any threat to the order of society, irrespective of its frequency or severity, requires granting law enforcement whatever powers are necessary to prevent it.  Political-state logic recognises that giving any new power to law enforcement may encroach upon the rights and freedom of the citizenry, and weighs up the necessity of new powers in that context.

Harcourt wrote the article in response to the US Supreme Court ruling (5 to 4, natch) that police can perform strip-searches on people arrested for misdemeanours (think a broken tail-light, for example), essentially because the number of people so arrested who have then smuggled or helped smuggle weapons or illicit substances into jail is known to be non-zero [1].  That said, there's plenty of other examples of this kind of thinking on both sides of the pond - Labour's attempt to increase the time one can spend under arrest without charge to 54 days comes immediately to mind.

To add my two cents, this is why people arguing "If you're not guilty, there's nothing to worry about" wind me up so much.  Quite aside from it being close to impossible to believe that those who say that stick to the idea invariably and independently of the law under discussion - those who cheer on arbitrary strip-searches often turn pale when it's suggested their emails come under scrutiny - it's an implicit argument that the political-state approach is pointless, because the trade-offs it considers don't actually exist.

It really shouldn't be difficult, even without reading Harcourt's piece, to understand why that position is deeply problematic, and potentially exceptionally dangerous.

[1] Since such minor infractions include public indecency, one could say that Harcourt is searching for how to strip police of the power to search for strippers to strip-search.  Wrap your brain around that for a second.

North And South

We're diggin' a foundation
For a future to be made
...
There's gonna be a killin'

It's back!  At long last, winter is once again coming.  But should we care?  How do - and should - we judge "The North Remembers."

(Season 1 spoilers throughout)

I suspect a lot of that comes down to how one views season openers. A decade and more of year-end cliffhangers and immediate (or near-immediate) resolutions have perhaps led us to certain expectations regarding how the action should resume once we settle around the television once again.  Even shows that are, comparatively speaking, more interested in using an opener as an on-ramp for the year to come (think X-Files, or middle period SG1) tend to at least resolve the immediate situation, in order to bring some closure whilst teasing about what comes next.

"The North Remembers" doesn't work that way.  Which is no surprise, of course; books have their own rules.  What it means though is that for anyone (which includes me) who recently re-watched "Fire and Blood" (or even watched it for the first time) as preparation for this new bushel of episodes have found themselves going from an expert ramping up of tensions - Robb's crowning, Dany's dragons, the Night's Watch sallying forth to face the White Walkers, the potential three-way war between King Robert's two younger brothers and the boy he mistakenly thought his son, and the fates of Sansa and Arya - to a full episode of breath-catching; of being told "this is where we are now."

Once you get over the gear shift, which is no less sudden for happening over a period long enough to create and receive a child in, the only relevant questions are this: how well is the new status quo presented, and how much is included in addition to make future viewings anything more than an aide memoire?

Humanity Passing By

Pause asked me today what I thought about the season finale of Being Human. As I've mentioned before, the lack of a post on something I've regularly posted on before is usually a comment in and of itself - I didn't either love or hate the episode enough to be inspired to write about it. 

Still, if anyone wants a more specific judgement, here it is: Season 4 came up with the most obvious storyline possible, and saw it through to its conclusion in the most obvious way possible.  The resulting experience was in no way unpleasant, but it wasn't really very arresting, either.  Reasonable people can disagree on the debate over whether season arcs really work or not (and they do, at great length), but an abundance of stand-alone episodes is one thing, and an abundance of filler something else. 

The off-screen shake-ups can't have helped, admittedly, but that's a reason to understand why things went wrong, not to pretend that everything is fine.  Had Season proved the final hurrah for the series (which was a distinct possibility), I suspect it would have been viewed as a distinctly sub-par coda.  Now that we know there will indeed be a Season 5, this year feels like an incredibly drawn-out explanation for the new status quo, which is so similar to how the show began in its first season, the whole enterprise seems distinctly unnecessary.  I remember a friend of mind once complaining about how cheated he felt when he first watched Episode 1 of Red Dwarf III, as a unreadably fast block of scrolling text explained all the things that had happened off-screen.  This is the exact opposite - eight episodes devoted to setting up changes that could be explained in three paragraphs and some clever exposition come Season 5.

Oh, and two more spoiler-filled points: