This biography chronicles the rise of Robert Moses, the urban planner who shaped New York City in the middle of the 20th century.
#7 on the NYT Best Sellers List for Hardcover Graphic Books
Month: January 2015
THE GIGANTIC BEARD THAT WAS EVIL by Stephen Collins
On the magical island of Here, a powerful and unruly beard disrupts the previously tidy and hairless existence of Dave, the island’s most fastidious resident.
#5 on the NYT Best Sellers List for Hardcover Graphic Books
Founder's Big Lushious
Big Lushious is a bit sweet for me, but the way the tart raspberry cuts through at the end is pretty impressive. Not sure this would be a beer I could drink all the time, but it’s interesting enough that I would drink it again.
New Year's Resolutions
So many times, a list of New Year’s resolutions go through things that people want to do to make themselves better. I’ve done that in the past, but this year, I’m going to try to set legitimate tangible goals and see what happens:
1) Read a book a week.
2) Go to at least one moped rally.
3) Post to the blog three times a week.
4) Find (or create) a boardgame group and play a game a week.
5) Explore more of Kalamazoo, trying a new restaurant or bar every two weeks.
Blend Evolution
Blend recipe for Forty-Six (roasted 12/18)
Coffees, much like any other consumed agricultural crop, will change over time. As these coffees change, coffee roasters have to tweak out their blends in an effort to maintain a consistent blend profile. For example, the photo at the left is the current blend recipe for Counter Culture Coffee’s “Forty-Six”.
What’s interesting is that the original blend of Forty-Six (or MAG1 as it was originally listed in the Counter Culture recipe sheet) was 33.3% French Roast (which would vary, but was typically something Central or South American like Nicaragua or Peru), 33.3% Guatemala (almost always Antigua, and from the same estate, though the name has long since left my head) and 33.3% Sumatra (from various estates, but the green buyer at the time focused on “clean”-er Sumatras rather than the crazy funkballs that you often see).
The most fascinating part of this to me is the fact that this coffee is now half African, utilizing the big berry and fruit notes from the Ethiopians to make up the flavor profile of the replaced Indonesian. I suspect that by upping the dark roast component, they can use the lighter roasted Africans to round it out.
New Today On Blinkingline Journal
My Top 10 for 2014
According to my stats, these are the artists who I listened to the most in 2014:
| Iron & Wine | 269 |
|---|---|
| Cat Power | 257 |
| Bon Iver | 243 |
| Fleet Foxes | 205 |
| Feist | 169 |
| The National | 165 |
| Great Lake Swimmers | 161 |
| Grizzly Bear | 159 |
| The Shins | 149 |
| Arctic Monkeys | 149 |
| Pixies | 147 |
| The Walkmen | 145 |
New Today On Blinkingline Journal
“
May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.
I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you’ll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.
”
– Neil Gaiman
New Year, New Words
About 2 months ago, I started thinking about a reboot of my website, the blinkingline journal. I’ve owned that domain for so many years I can’t even remember. It started as a repository for an email journal of “experimental fiction” (for lack of a better term) that I worked on in college. Once I left college, the guys who worked on it sort of lost interest, but I had all the original information and thought it might be neat to have it on the web.
After awhile, I got bored with it, and scrapped it and had an actual blog for a while, but I felt like I wasn’t very good at it. I think I maybe set ambitions too high or something like that. So eventually, I moved the blog to Tumblr and made it into what it is today…essentially a daily bit of randomness from the web. What it doesn’t have a lot of though is anything personal that I want to work on, it’s just a curated bit of entertainment that I push out once a day. Those posts pushed to Twitter and Facebook, and occasionally people would see them and respond, which I liked because, frankly, I like engaging with people over the internet, even if it’s over silly things like potato mashers.
What doesn’t really fit in with the blinkingline journal is my personal stuff. I think there have been a few personal posts there, but honestly, they are so few and far between and when I have posted more personal content, I felt like I was just fucking the BLJ up.
So I created the Megaphone.
The BLJ will stay what it is, and those daily posts will replicate over to Megaphone every day. If you’re more interested in whatever is going on with me on a more personal level, or weird nonsense I may create or do, then you might be interested in following along here. If you’re a friend of mine on a social network, I’ve cut off the feeds from the BLJ and will now be pushing out from Megaphone exclusively. If that clutters up your stream, with stuff you could care less about, feel free to block me or whatever.
Happy Coup Year!
