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Here’s a recipe for a 1 gallon batch of mead that I’m testing out. Instead of the 6-9 month turn around, this should be drinkable in 3 weeks. It’s something to hold you over while you wait for your larger batches to complete.

I’ll let you know how it turns out, but if you’d like to join in, here’s the steps that I followed:

Equipment:

• 2 1 gallon jugs
• 1 airlock
• 1 cap

Ingredients:

• 2 lbs Natural Clover Honey
• 1 lb Buckwheat Natural Honey
• 1/2 tsp grape tanin
• 1/2 tsp yeast nutrient
• 1 pkt Lalvin K1-V1116 Yeast

Procedure:

1. Dissolve the honey in a quart of warm water.
2. Dissolve the tanin and nutrient in 8oz of warm water.
3. Place the yeast in 4oz of warm water for 15 minutes. Stir it in to the water, don’t let it clump.
4. Pour the honey into your 1 gallon carboy, add water until about three inches from the top.
5. Add the yeast.
6. Cap and shake vigorously.
7. Remove the cap and replace it with your airlock
8. In one week, rack into a second 1 gallon carboy
9. Two weeks after that, drink up!

I just popped open a bottle of a cherry stout that we brewed up a month or so ago, and I agree with Brett: this is a nice beer, and probably the best one we’ve done so far.

It could use a bigger head, but that may have been caused by the reduced amount of sugar we used in the bottling process. We were given some high quality brewer’s yeast by the generous Chris Hall, and he was concerned that we might blow our puny bottles if we used the normal amount. Who knows.

In his speech to the American Legion, Mr Bush hit back, accusing Iran’s Revolutionary Guards of funding and arming insurgents in Iraq.

And he said Iran’s leaders could not avoid some responsibility for attacks on coalition troops and Iraqi civilians.

“I have authorised our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities,” he said.

The BBC’s Justin Webb, in Washington, says this looks like a conscious effort by the White House to elevate the tension between Washington and Tehran to a new level.

Other interesting news can be found here.

So. If this is the case and things have escalated into armed conflict, all Democrats need to start asking some serious questions about their beloved party and its leadership. If we go to war with Iran, the blood is also on the hands of the legislative branch. It’s time for them to show some personal responsibility. They have the opportunity to impeach. They have the opportunity to demand that the President must respect the Constitution and ask for Congress’s official declaration of war.

It’s getting harder every day for me to believe that the Democratic leadership (meaning all Democrats holding office) even object to the Warfare State. Please, for the sake of optimism, prove me wrong. Show me that the Democrats are fighting tooth and nail to stop the war drums. Show me that they aren’t casting votes (note that all of the Democratic presidential candidates voted for this tripe) that make the war all the more “justifiable”. Pretty please?

A choice excerpt:

At Eastern Hills Elementary School in Fort Worth, there was no discussion about it. “I think we should include God in everything,” said parent Robin Spruell. “I don’t think time out has stopped drive-bys. ‘Under God’ might.”

News 8 could find no dissenting voices. “We need to keep God in everything. It helps the children understand faith; have faith in God,” said another parent, Tracy Bice.

I feel sorry for those children, especially those that are going to have to recite things that they do not believe in (or are unsure of) on a daily basis just to be accepted in the pack. This is State enforced, compulsory brainwashing. Everyday, the State of Texas is sending a message to the non-Christian minority: 2+2=5, repeat this every morning, or you will not be part of the pack. Do to our nomadic past, the child instinctively understands that if he or she is cut off from her peers, her survival is threatened. It doesn’t matter that there is not a physical threat in this era, the brain understands that ostracism is a terrible, terrible thing. So the child will comply. Sadly, the more the child repeats the mantra that 2+2=5, the more he or she will believe it. God is great.

One has to wonder how a religion that was inspired by such an enlightened fellow has been reduced to a steaming pile of reactionary crap. What are they afraid of? Is their belief system so weak that they need the force of the State to keep it together? Can they not see that such practices are harmful and morally repugnant? I think the American Christian community needs to do itself some good and take a long, reflective look in the mirror. Surely they wouldn’t want to be known as the American Taliban, would they?

The only reason I could possibly ever make any comments at all about the markets is that if you were to ask me, a Wall Street analyst and a Baboon to predict, beyond the level of common sense advice, what the market will do, we’d all have about an equal chance of being right. It turns out that almost all human beings suck and anticipation. Personally, given the choice between a market analyst who believes that growth can go on forever, and me, who doesn’t understand how we got this far without exploding, I’d let the baboon pick. [*]

I’m with Sharon.

Imagine trying to make sense of an amalgam of Timothy Leary’s eight neurological circuits, G.I. Gurdjieff’s self-observation exercises, Alfred Korzybskis general semantics, Aleister Crowley’s magical theorems, and the several disciplines of Yoga; not to mention Christian Science, relativity, quantum mechanics, and many other approaches to understanding the world around us! That is exactly what Robert Anton Wilson does in Prometheus Rising. In short, this is a book about how the human mind works and what you can do to make the most of yours.

What a trip. What a highly recommended trip. The late Wilson took me on a journey using Timothy Leary’s (yes, that Timothy Leary) eight circuit model of the human mind, giving me plenty of exercises at the end of each explanation. Most of them I’m still working on, as they cannot be thoroughly worked through in the week that I read the book.

He starts by stating that the human animal has (like all life on the planet) evolved over time and is still on that journey. Throughout that evolution, the mind has developed a number of circuits (‘facilities’ may be a more accessible word) that it relies on to process the inputs that are fed to it. Think of the mind as being somewhat similar to the computer, and each of these circuits is flashed into the mind at different stages in our life.

As Leary states, the eight circuits are roughly:

1. The Survival Circuit
2. The Territorial / Emotional Circuit
3. The Semantic Circuit
4. The Moral Circuit
5. The Holistic Circuit
6. The Collective Circuit
7. The Meta-Programming Circuit
8. The Quantum Non-Local Circuit

Wilson argues that the first four circuits are present in all human beings, and the the latter four are developing in the species at this time.