Yesterday was “Ready The EarthBoxes For Planting Day”. The EarthBox holding the lemongrass needed to be dumped upside down into a wheelbarrow because the roots had grown down through the base aeration screen and into the reservoir. The plant had to be cut off of the screen to get it out of the box:
Upside down in the wheelbarrow.
If you look closely, the roots have perfectly formed to the molded shapes on the bottom of the container. The circle (bottom right) is the fill tube, which was almost completely blocked. That explains why it *seemed* to be blocked in late summer:
Lemongrass isn’t supposed to winter over, but I think that it might have lived, at least so far. It’s been transplanted into a planter box along the back fence.
The lesson: Super invasive root systems won’t work well in the EarthBox, or more accurately — the lemongrass went gangbusters, but the box isn’t designed for *that*.
Reuben’s held out on me this year – they made a second pumpkin beer beyond their flagship pumpkin beer that they did not release until November. This beer was based on a saison, definitely a beer that you don’t see used very often in the pumpkin beer world. They had a very limited quantity of the Pumpkin Saison and it didn’t make it past the weekend that it went on tap, but you know that Iron Chef was there to try it and let you know what you missed.
The beer pours very dark reddish brown in color with notes of roasted pumpkin, pumpkin spice and saison funk on the nose. The beer starts out small with subtle grain notes and a distinctive saison background, then moving into a distinct pumpkin realm with light notes of roast and pumpkin seeds before hitting you with a burst of pumpkin pie spices – cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves are distinctly present. The beer finishes long with strong pumpkin pie character a pleasant dryness and just a hint of cinnamon heat. The pumpkin saison manages to bring more to spices to the party than the Pfeiffer’s Pumpkin Rye that Reuben’s also brews, giving a nice counterpunch to that beer. They also took great care in preserving the grassy notes of the saison and not completely overwhelming them with the spices, creating an interesting and balanced beer. I still would rather have the Pfeiffer’s Pumpkin, but this would be a welcome change of pace next pumpkin beer season.
Reuben’s Pumpkin Saison carves out a niche with a spooky 4 jack o’lanterns out of 5.
Love Diablo 1 & II? You’ll *like* Diablo III, probably.
Diablo III is different.
1. Instead of a skill tree you get skills, then sub-skills to choose from. Evidently it was simplified because the developers felt that the skill tree concept was too complex for this day and age, or at least too complex for their target audience. I don’t know about that — there are many popular games that use skill trees, and as for me I enjoy having to pick between two trees, or two good skills within the same tree. Want 5 offensive skills and no defensive skills or buffs? Great! As it is now you can put any skill into any slot, then select the most optimal sub-skills to go with the build. If you’re not happy with the choices you can change for free, on the fly, at no cost. I think that the way they implemented it dumbs it down too much.
[In a related sidenote — in the modern era, most games that use skill trees allow you to respec (change your skill choices) for a nominal cost. Fallout doesn’t, and Diablo II didn’t either — you had to have a *really* firm idea of what you wanted the end result to look like, otherwise you’d re-roll. (Create another character and start over.) A patch changes the game balance? Tough! Go live with your sub-optimal build or re-roll!]
2. If you’re a long-time player there’s going to be a good chance that you won’t love the new plot. In my opinion the writers took some liberties with the canon that they should be left alone. I’ll leave it at that.
3. Diablo III is easy! Like, super easy! We played two-player split screen and defeated Diablo on Normal difficulty without drinking a potion. Some of the other boss fights end with the boss dead at about the same time that they finish monologuing. I think we finished Normal difficulty with over 100 healing potions each. There aren’t anymore super high dps baddies like the Death Knights, Raptors, or Succubus. Elemental effects as a group are relatively harmless except maybe the lava. This was probably a balance decision — the healing potions have a 30-second cooldown, so if you *did* want to spam potions you’d be screwed. I think they they erred too far of the side of low damage by the monsters all around.
For reference, I remember playing Diablo I & II with a buddy on the PC. For the really nasty boss fights one person would “drive” and click the spells, and the other guy would have his fingers over the number keys on the keyboard — each number key representing a healing potion — the driver would say “healing”, and the healer would use the next potion… it took too long to take your hand off of the mouse, find the next potion, and hit the key — you’d be long dead by then.
Heck, for that matter, if you died in Diablo I you’d drop all of your gear. Good luck fighting back to your corpse to retrieve it when you’re naked. Usually you had to re-gear from scratch. (People would outright rage quit Diablo I if it were released today.) Diablo III gives you a death timer that lasts a few seconds, then you can jump right back into action fully geared, the only cost of death being an insignificant gear repair fee.
In fact, all gear repair fees are insignificant. I don’t know why they bothered to implement that again, other than maybe “we had that feature last time!” It’s just one more fiddly thing to deal with that doesn’t add fun to the game. Repairs cost around 200 gold every 30 minutes of gameplay, which is basically the same as zero cost.
Related to that —
4. White drops (commons) are fairly literally valueless. At this point (level 50) we’ve got around 500,000 gold. Whites are worth about 9 gold at the vendor. The opportunity cost of picking up a White gives them a negative value if we do accidentally or intentional pick them up.
5. The maps are only vaguely random. The exits all tend to be in the same places game after game. Part of the fun of the other versions was finding the waypoints and the paths to the next zone. Not so this time.
6. Runes are gone. No more Runewords either. The devs insist that they kept the runes. The runes now are really what I was referring to as sub-skills, above. Can’t fool me. Opportunity missed.
———-
Overall those points come across as “things were better in the old days” gripes, and that’s fair — Diablo I & II had their irritating qualities. If I’d come across this game completely “cold” I’d probably like it somewhat more than I do. But I think that they took a fundamentally near perfect game in Diablo 2 and made it easier and dumber. A total overhaul wasn’t necessary, but that’s the route they picked.
And it took them thirteen years to do it.
Still, it’s prettier than the old ones. They fixed some of the worst of the problems from the Diablo III PC release from what I’ve heard. (No more auction house, no more required to be online to play… two truly awful decisions.) It remains a fun hack-and-slash high-fantasy game with random loot drops. If that’s your thing, and you can pick it up for around $20 you’ll get at least a few evenings out of it, and maybe more, so I’d say go for it.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but it *is* fun sometimes to run around and smash monsters.
Over time I’ve decided that NFL outcomes are more random than I prefer to be involved with (read: gamble on). There are too few possessions per team, and too few scores — if the NFL awarded one point for a touchdown instead of seven a “normal” result would be something like 4 points to 2. Turnovers have a huge impact on the end result. Fumbles happen at random times. Which team recovers the fumble is basically a coin flip… as of today I think there’s too much granularity all around to try to predict outcomes with any accuracy.
With that in mind, Bill Barnwell’s playoff preview included this little gem:
Since 1990, teams that have won the turnover battle in a given game during the regular season have won that game 79.1 percent of the time. In the playoffs, that figure climbs to 84.2 percent. Of course, everybody knows that winning the turnover battle is important; it’s figuring out how to win the turnover battle that’s the hard part.
So there’s that. Yikes.
Maybe my current feeling about predictably predicting NFL results is party based around having seen so much unpredictability. When I was (much) younger the randomness issue didn’t concern me that much. Probably because it was difficult to quantify much of anything from a 1980’s box score. (And that includes baseball — in the 80’s there was no walk info, or ball-strike, or total pitches..) Even back then I couldn’t find a reason for 8-10% of the NFL results.
I really intended to post this on December 31st, but I forgot to switch the date on the post, so it is a couple of days late.
Overall 2013 was a banner year for beer in Seattle, particularly Ballard with a significant number of new breweries opening and the existing breweries kicking it up a notch with the quality of their beers. It was a particularly banner year for beer reviews on this site also, with me posting just north of 100 beer reviews on the site (that is a ton of beer and that doesn’t even take into account the beer notes I have but have not posted yet). This has made determining my best beer of 2013 much more difficult than last year. Here are the rules for determining the winner:
The beer had to score 5 out of 5 on the Iron Chef Scale
I had to post a review of the beer sometime in 2013
Vintage beers are not eligible to win
If I named the beer, it wasn’t eligible to win (so, no, my beloved Ate2Four Porter is not the beer of the year)
Previous winners are not eligible win again, no matter how delicious they are (It means Reuben’s Pfeffer’s Pumpkin can’t win again)
The winner is picked by an esteemed panel of me, myself and I
This really was a challenge – I had about 15 beers that I scored 5 points so I took down my list from there to 4 contenders for the best. It was actually going to be 5, then I realized that the one that would have been in the 5th spot has not yet had a review posted, so, it is an early contender for 2014 (and no, I won’t tell you what it is). The final 4 came down to hoppy vs. roasted, so let me show you how this played out:
Matchup 1: Battle Hops
Our contenders are Reuben’s Imperial Rye IPA and Populuxe Full Spectrum (previously Founders) Imperial IPA.
A good old Ballard brewery smack down and a competition between 2 breweries I love and what I think are the 2 best beers these breweries make. This was a hard choice. Full Spectrum is one of the best Imperials out on the market and I think it holds its own against beers like Pliny (yes, it is that good). The problem is, I think this about the Imperial Rye IPA (the cask version particularly):
I tasted this side by side with the regular version of the Imperial Rye, a beer I dearly love, and honestly, the cask version blew the doors off the regular version. After tasting the cask version, the regular, a fantastic beer in its own right, didn’t have the same level of intensity as its sibling. I am going to go on the record here as saying the cask version of the Imperial Rye IPA is one of the 10 best beers I have ever had and quite possibly in the top 5. Yes, it was that good. Next time it makes an appearance, you should be waiting in line for this beer when it gets tapped.
As good as Full Spectrum was, the Imperial Rye edges it out just slightly and moves onto the finals in a close match between 2 heavyweights.
Matchup 2: Battle Roast
Our contenders are Reuben’s Bourbon Imperial Russian Stout and Midnight Sun Moscow Russian Imperial Stout.
This could also have been called battle barrel as both beers spent some time in oak.
Again, a tough choice. Both were massive beers and both were spectacular. Both of these beers had tremendous balance and flavor, and it really came down to a number of small differences. I can sum it up about the winner in a post I made about the beer in its initial review:
If you like Russian Imperial Stouts, you need to try this beer. Really, it is that good, and possibly the best I have ever had.
That beer was the Midnight Sun Moscow, edging Reuben’s (and preventing an all-Reuben’s Final) by the tip of a Cossak’s bayonet.
That sets up the final between Anchorage and Seattle, with 2 heavy hitter ready to slug it out in the ring. They went 15 rounds, toe to toe, bringing us in with a split decision. I will turn it over to our ring announcer for the results:
The winner, by split decision, and 2013 Cheapseateats.com Beer of the Year…Reuben’s Imperial Rye IPA!
A Reuben’s beer takes the title for the second straight year! Another well earned (and hard fought) victory for Reuben’s and congratulations to Adam and Mike for making such fantastic beer. Can Reuben’s do it again in 2014? Only time will tell. I can say that they have some pretty stiff competition to go up against if they want to 3-peat.
The great thing about baseball is that you can generally use advanced metrics to make a prediction about the performance of a team in an upcoming season with reasonable accuracy. There are certainly things you can’t predict (injuries, guys significantly over/under performing, luck, etc.) but those metrics have been tested and tweaked to give you a pretty reasonable picture of what will happen in the upcoming season.
Football, for whatever reason, doesn’t seem to enjoy the same level of prediction accuracy. Back in August, ESPN had their NFL preview and included projected standings based on a computer simulation. Here is what we got:
Team
Overall W-L
Home W-L
Road W-L
MIA
10-6
7-1
3-5
NE
9-7
8-0
1-7
BUF
5-11
5-3
0-8
NYJ
4-12
4-4
0-8
CIN
11-5
7-1
4-4
BAL
9-7
8-0
1-7
PIT
9-7
7-1
2-6
CLE
5-11
4-4
1-7
HOU
11-5
8-0
3-5
IND
8-8
6-2
2-6
TEN
6-10
6-2
0-8
JAX
4-12
4-4
0-8
DEN
13-3
8-0
5-3
KC
10-6
7-1
3-5
SD
5-11
5-3
0-8
OAK
4-12
4-4
0-8
WAS
10-6
8-0
2-6
DAL
8-8
7-1
1-7
NYG
8-8
7-1
1-7
PHI
6-10
6-2
0-8
GB
11-5
8-0
3-5
CHI
9-7
8-0
1-7
MIN
7-9
7-1
0-8
DET
5-11
4-4
1-7
ATL
11-5
8-0
3-5
TB
9-7
7-1
2-6
CAR
7-9
7-1
0-8
NO
6-10
6-2
0-8
SEA
13-3
8-0
5-3
SF
13-3
8-0
5-3
STL
7-9
7-1
0-8
AZ
3-13
3-5
0-8
It wasn’t the most accurate prediction as they only got 4 out of the 8 division winners correct and 2 out of the 4 Wild Card winners correct. The win totals look reasonable on a cursory level until I actually looked at what made up the records. According to the simulation, 10 teams would go undefeated at home in 2013, 10 teams would go 7-1 and only 6 teams would be .500 or worse. On the flip side, they predicted that only 4 teams would be at least .500 on the road (with no one going better than 5-3) and 19 teams would be either 1-7 or 0-8 away from home.
Now I don’t know exactly what went into the programming of the simulation, but let me tell you, this just looks wrong. It seems that the programmers put too much emphasis on home field advantage and caused some whacky results. I am surprised that they let this be published, given that any average football fan would realize these numbers just look wrong. Just how wrong are they? Well, I decided to look at the road records and over the past 11 NFL Seasons (2002 – 2012), there have been 13 teams that have failed to win a game on the road, which is about 4% of the teams. The prediction for 2013 was for 10 teams to go winless away from home, or 37%. On the flip, over the same period, 46% of NFL teams played at least .500 ball on the road. The computer for 2013? Just 12%. Um, I am pretty sure that you have a significant error in the calculation here.
In some ways, I am comparing apples to oranges by looking at the historical numbers. How did the computer actually do with its predictions? Well, here you go:
Number of Wins
Home Prediction
Home Actual
Road Prediction
Road Actual
0
0
0
12
1
1
0
2
7
6
2
0
1
4
4
3
1
5
5
8
4
5
6
1
6
5
2
7
3
2
6
4
5
0
5
7
10
3
0
0
8
10
3
0
0
Those numbers look pretty bad in comparison, especially at the upper and lower ends of the spectrum.
How about total wins? Well, that looks a little better, but only because the increased number of bands flattens out the distribution:
Number of Wins
Projected
Total
13
3
2
12
0
3
11
4
4
10
3
2
9
5
1
8
3
7
7
3
4
6
3
1
5
4
1
4
3
5
3
1
1
2
0
1
The moral of this story is if you are trying to figure out how many games your team will win in 2014, take a look at their schedule, go through it game by game and predict a winner. My guess is that you will be more accurate than the computer.
I tend to stay away from the lighter beers, just because they usually lack the depth of flavors that I am looking for when drinking a beer. There are some breweries that I would still try their lighter beers, just because of their track record with making beers that I enjoy. NW Peaks is one of them. So when they released Kaleetan as part of the August Mountainbeers lineup, I was actually looking forward to drinking it.
From the NW Peaks Website:
The name. The mountain. Kaleetan is a peak close to Snoqualmie pass. It is one of the more impressive peaks in the area and its name means arrow, while others have described it as “matterhorn” (both aptly describing it). It’s a great day climb and/or ski depending on the time of year and conditions. In the summer trails go from Denny Creek to Melakwa lake. Heading up to the summit gully and easy class 3 scrambling can take you to the exposed summit. In winter, source lake is the preferred starting point.
The beer. Kaleetan is an “American Wheat Beer.” It has a wheat base and we used hops that have lemon qualities for the flavor and aroma. We finished off the beer with some lemon zest, enhancing the lemon properties. The result was a light beer with a light/delicate lemon aroma. The aroma is followed by a bready flavor with light herbal notes (a secondary characteristic from the sorachi ace hops). Overall, Kaleetan is an easy drinking wheat ale with light lemon and herbal notes.
The beer pours pale yellow in color with a fizzy white head. The nose is dominated by strong notes of yeast and wheat with touches of lemon interspersed. On the first sip, light notes of grain appear on the front of the beer with a very mild hint of yeast, before moving into slightly dry/tart lemon notes, before finishing with a hint of refreshing bitterness and touches of lemon peel. The beer is light and refreshing but surprisingly complex and it vaguely reminded me of a pilsner and would be perfect on a hot day. I think the beer is complex enough to keep an advanced beer drinker happy and subtle enough to have mass appeal.
NW Peaks Kaleetan-weizzen climbs to the top and announces its presence with a strong 4 yodels out of 5.
This was a very disappointing season for fresh hopped beers. Even ones that I have had in the past and loved seemed to be lacking something this year. One of the few exceptions to this was Elysian’s entry into the style, their Prairie Rose Wet Hopped IPA. Elysian described the beer as follows:
Named for the scented flowers of the Yakima Valley and the Texas Panhandle – Amarillo – Prairie Rose is a fresh hop IPA bittered with eponymous hop shooting stars – Galaxy and Comet – to a magnitude of 60 IBU’s and finished with 40 pounds worth of we Amarillo hops from Virgil Gamache Farms. 6.5% ABV.
The beer pours vaguely orange in color with citrus and citrus peel dominating the nose with background green hops and grain. A burst of citrus on the palate initially but quickly moving to slightly floral hop bitterness with a touch of resin. The beer then finishes with a mild burnt citrus peel that lingers pleasantly with just a hint of bitterness. Big bold hop character dominates without overpowering your palate, leaving a rich and complex flavor profile when you debate if a second pint is a good idea.
Elysian’s Prairie Rose Wet Hopped IPA saunters in riding high with a handsome 4 gauchos out of 5.
My ideal gardening book would have a title similar to: Four-Season Urban Container Gardening In The Pacific Northwest, Seattle Edition.
That book doesn’t seem to exist, and for good reason. It’d sell about four copies. Digging around the internet gives a hodge-podge of information, but nothing concise and organized.
I was looking through the book options at the local nursery and came across Food Grown Right, In Your Backyard. It’s written by the co-founders of the Seattle Urban Farm Company, published in 2012. The book has an emphasis on small-scale organic urban gardening. It includes sections on designing the garden space, general gardening knowledge, detailed profiles of popular vegetables and herbs, and (my favorite) tables indicating the appropriate schedule for starting seeds indoors, transplanting, or direct seeding outside. (I loves me some tables and charts, y’know.) It doesn’t talk much about winter gardening, but other than that it’s an excellent all-around resource.
Amazon link here. To date it has received 5 stars out of 5 stars for all 35 Amazon customer reviews.
In a related note, I think I’ll be checking this out in 2014 — Bastille Cafe & Bar has a 4,500 square foot rooftop garden installed and maintained by one of the authors. Bastille offers tours on Mondays, April through September. The cost is $10, which includes a cocktail.
Now if I just need to figure out the best way to succession-plant an EarthBox.. I’ve got some ideas, but searching “succession planting” on the EB forums doesn’t turn up much. Time for a new thread..
…Bull Durham, the iconic 1988 comedy from Minor Leaguer-turned-Hollywood director Ron Shelton, is being made into a musical. The production, adapted for the stage by Shelton, is set to premiere at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre in September 2014 in advance of a Broadway run.
The link includes an interview with Ron Shelton.
Next on the road trip docket — Harry Potter On Ice!
Actually, no. I’m not travelling to New York to see that when it happens.
FlatbreadGarden 