Rubber, Buns, and Liquor

The Wall Street Journal has an article today (subscription required) about the Washington State initiative to deregulate its liquor stores. The measure would privatize the state run liquor stores and enable grocery stores to sell liquor, just like they do to great effect in Cali. A Portland area news station has more, reporting that, if passed, the state would end up shedding 900 workers due to the privatization. I haven't yet been able to find out if the tax is still sky-high, but the price is bound to go down due to competition, even if it's still there.

This is great news, so long as you're not a neo-prohibitionist. When I lived in Seattle, liquor was pretty hard to access, especially if you lived downtown. Being government-run, the stores had ridiculous hours. If the idea was to prevent people from drinking too much, it backfired, as you would just stock up on a ton to make sure you didn't run out. Virginia was the same way; I would end up driving to Maryland at ten o'clock at night because the government run stores would shut down. So much for preventing driving.

I've heard (but am too lazy to look up) that one of the reasons for so much control is to encourage consumption of beer and wine, as Washington has an abundance of local breweries and wineries. As a brewer myself, I appreciate the variety and supply sources it brings, but I can't help but think that micro-distilleries are the next wave. When I was in Kentucky a few months ago, the bourbon aisle of the liquor store was packed with local labels that all held their slots in the minds of whiskey takers.

Columbian Soup with Noodles aka What To Do With Pork Drippings

A few nights ago I made some grilled barbeque ribs, which produced a lot of liquid in the oven stage. I was raised to save everything, and so I ended up with a pint or so of pork drippings for a soup. I patched together a couple Columbian and Mexican chicken soup recipes, as well as my mom's homemade noodles.

Unique points: homemade noodles, pork drippings, Indian/Italian blend of spices

Noodles

2 2/3 cup flour

3 whole eggs

2 tsp salt

1/4 cup water

Pour the flour into a bowl and make a cavity. Fill the cavity with the eggs and salt, and mix everything together well. Slowly add the water while mixing until the dough is sticky but still firm. Cut the dough in two, and roll out one section of the dough onto a well floured surface. The dough should be in a strip about three inches long, well floured on both sides. Cut the strip into pieces between a half centimeter and a centimeter. It's important to keep all surfaces floured so that the noodles don't stick.

Soup

2 cups pork drippings

4 cups chicken broth

2 tsp oil

4 cloves chopped garlic

2 tsp cumin

1 tsp oregano

1 tsp chili powder

1 bay leaf

2 stalks sliced celery

2 sliced carrots

1 can corn

salt and pepper

noodles (from above)

Add the oil and garlic to the pot over medium heat, sauteing the garlic for a couple minutes. Add the drippings, broth, and seasonings, mixing well. Add the vegetables and bring to a boil. Once boiling, add the noodles and cook for twenty minutes at a low boil, stirring occasionally.

It should make 6 or so servings. I served it with homemade buns, which were a nice side. It ends up being quite thick from the noodles and flour, so feel free to add more broth.

U.S. Ecoregions

I really love maps. They're such an efficient and accessible way to convey information, especially for a visual person. One of my favorite map subjects is ecoregions. Ecoregions are regions defined by geology, vegetation, climate, soil, and other characteristics, and they're great because each classification and differentiation tells you enough about the area that you can build a solid mental impression, especially if grouped with a nice landscape photography site like Terra Galleria and a childhood of cross-country travel. The EPA has some good maps on its site, and I've reproduced some of my favorites below. It's interesting to think about the differences between the maps and why some mapmakers thought they were worth pointing out while others didn't.

The above map is my favorite map of the US. There are things it misses - the Yellowstone Rockies, Bighorns, and Black Hills are all pretty unique, yet are grouped as the same ecoregion - but if you start picking apart mountain ranges too much things get complicated pretty quickly. It calls out the Sandhills, a somewhat surreal area probably less than a thousandth of the country knows exists. In fact, what I love most about this map is how it differentiates the western and central plains, which often are neglected for the flashier mountainscapes at their doorsteps.

The map above is a bit simplistic, but that's probably about right for most people. When you get out West there are some pretty stark changes in the landscape, which a highly differentiated map doesn't emphasize.

This map is probably the closest to what you'll see if you actually travel between regions. I doubt anyone would notice a difference between the Snake River Valley and the Wyoming Basin, other than the backdrops. The map puts more of an emphasis on mountains than basins/plateaus, and is one of the few to include the Basin Ranges in Nevada, a nice touch. Also, the jagged and vivid color outlines illustrate just how much more interesting the West is than the East. Just in case you forgot.

But this post wouldn't be complete without some sentimentality thrown in, so here goes: these regions are a reminder of how geographically insignificant state lines really are. States are just jurisdictions, a patchwork of property rights that lays claim to the land but doesn't actually influence it. As any South Dakotan knows, an East River farmer has more in common with a downstate Minnesotan than with his West River rancher brethren. The simplicity of rivers, lakes, and latitude are measurable etches, caged by welcome signs and outstretched commerce clause jurisprudence. But they only hold place on paper or a hundred feet below the land surface, a scratch compared to the significant but transitional personality of ecology. Or if you'd like a more favorable spin: it's nice the states share the mountains and deserts.

A Brief Guide to Trail Etiquette

I enjoy a run through the woods, and encourage everyone to do the same. However, some people's kids just don't follow the rule of the trail when it comes to etiquette. I generally have a pre-Nixon quaker's temper, so violators don't bother me much, but here's a quick summary of the more frequent encounters:

1. Too much body spray. Nothing takes my breath away like a lung full of Someday by Bieber (if I had a dollar for every time someone said that...). I don't understand, why would you hose yourself down with perfume and body spray before a run? You're around someone for at most a few seconds, so it isn't as if you're going to gag them (and let's be honest - how many of those heavily scented people have you seen that are really working up much of a sweat?), and you end up leaving this trail of daffodil-scented diethyl malonate that steals the life of everything behind and takes away a much needed gulp of oxygen. I don't even wear deodorant before I run, since sweat can prevent underarm chafing. This is the one time you should not have used Odorono.

2. Passing. It's like driving: run on the right, pass on the left.

3. Dog or cellphone. It's odd that this is a problem. People on cellphones are fine, people with dogs are fine, but when the two combine they create this distracted, twenty foot leashed menace that tripwires the path like that flying creature scene in The Crow. I take it back, it isn't odd at all that this is a problem.

4. iPod Reverse Red Rover. This is where an O-line of gals will go for a walk with either ear buds or just Jersey style speaking volume (de facto death metal). Your calls of "on your left" will be in vain, and you'll have to run behind them until someone approaches in front and you can sneak in through the hole they open up like a linebacker filling in a fullback's gap. Will they learn after the twelfth person pulls this move? No, they will not.

5. Just friends zoners. I feel for these people. Here's the thought process. I don't want Steve to think I'm interested, so we'll hang out and talk, but it should be around people. We'll go walking! That way I can hit two birds with one stone! But I don't want people to think we're together, so I'm going to keep a good four feet between us, maybe even walk on the other half of the path. Here's why it'll fail. When I come running by, and Steve hears my heavy footsteps (I always make more noise when I'm coming so that people will hear and move, and I don't have to say anything), he'll move over to Jill so I can get by on his side, trapping Jill on the other side of the path subject to his ever closer encroachment. Nice try, Jill, but should have just gone for coffee.

6. Speed-workers. This isn't so much for etiquette as it is amusement. At the busier trails or paths, there are a lot of guys in their 20's that see running as a way to pick up "tha ladiez". This makes them competitive, and when a skinny guy with a sub-7-minute mile passes them, they feel the need to show their value by sprinting ahead of him a short distance and coming to a stop, as if they just finished their run and the question of who is faster is still up in the air. After all, they were just doing some speed work today, training for the flag football game and toning some of the mass they squatted onto their thighs, you know bra?

7. Bicycling Hasidic Jews. I lift them up as model path users. They populate the trails in the hundreds, yet have never once breached a rule of etiquette. Do as they do, and good things will come.

8. James Deans. Rebels without a cause. These are the fly daddios that go against the grain and bike towards traffic on those paths that specify a direction. I don't need to explain why this breaches etiquette. And your glares only fuel their BMX bike pedals.

9. Brady Bunch biker gang. Who am I kidding? Etiquette doesn't apply to you folks. Biking four across + training wheels? No worries, it'll give me an excuse to tighten my shoelaces as I watch the dying remnants of Americana spin by. Bless their hearts, I'm glad they're out there, I really am.

10. Bridge trolling. I can usually dodge around lines of people, but trail bridges are barely wide enough for the average American, let alone two of them. If they refuse to go single file I'll be sure to brush my sweat frosted left arm against their scarlet Rutgers sweatshirt.

Fed Soc on Property vs. Policy

Last November at the Federalist Society's annual lawyer conference its intellectual property practice group held a panel on whether IP should be treated as a property right or regulatory policy. Peter Menell and Richard Epstein have duked it out in Cato and elsewhere over the validity of intellectual property rights, which this panel sort of takes as a given.

The video speaks for itself, though I think Epstein's response to Bell at 46 minutes in says a lot. He justifies any exceptions to the patent and copyright system with social welfare, and is more concerned with free speech restraints on copyright than he is on property rights on patent law, since it's unlikely that a free user of patented technology will use it except as a free rider. I think this treatment of these exceptions is at the core of the property/regulatory distinction: does the rule restrict what you carve out (property right)?

This rests on positive/negative language, which can be a matter of semantics, but I think it can have real consequences in the debate. It's easy to see how, when IP is caked in the language of property rights as opposed to regulatory policy, a strong supporter of property rights may forget that IP rights involve a confiscation of other, more established common law property in the name of economic efficiency. And for conservative policy, which generally wants to strengthen property rights while scaling back the administrative state, semantics do matter.

Dr. Strangebrew or: How I Learned to Stop Watching ESPN and Stir the Pot

In the spring the law school has its annual raffle to raise money for student funded fellowships, and this last year I volunteered to brew a batch of beer. The high bidder (winner isn't the word I'd use) chose a German brown, which was a first for me, but the style wasn't all that different from a porter I'd made a few years earlier. After hopping I performed the following steps:

1. Left the pot to watch college basketball.

2. Watched the pot volcano into a steady flow of brown hopped magma.

3. Removed said pot from the burner.

4. Rushed to the brew store to buy some replacement hops.

5. Ignored the actual label and grabbed 2 oz of Chinook.

6. Transformed a jolly Bavarian accordionist into an angry Arrogant Bastard-ish warrior.

I kid, it wasn't that strong, as I keep my boiling batch size on the small end. I ended up brewing him a different batch, and keeping half for myself, which has mellowed out in recent weeks. Here's the recipe:

Grains

1 pound chocolate malt

1 pound toasted rye

Extracts

7 pounds amber liquid malt extract

2 pounds amber dry malt extract

Hops

1 oz Hallertau (60 min) *remove by boiling over and caking onto stove

2 oz Chinook (60 min) *the mistake

1 oz Willamette (15 min)

Yeast

German Ale yeast

No real clues on what to call it, except you can't drink it very quickly and girls don't even pretend to like it. Dark IPA?

Hyperion

I finished Dan Simmons' Hyperion last night. The book's pegged as a sci-fi Canterbury Tales, which it sort of is, but without any time piece value. If fits into that Sci-fi/Fantasy niche populated by Star Wars outer Rim adventures and later Magic: The Gathering artwork.

One of my common complaints about sci-fi, and a mistake Dan makes in the Cantos, is the movement away from reality as a reference point. This is where ordinary objects are given a new name so as to create a feeling of being in a totally new world. It's annoying because you have to juggle a whole new set of terms and language, which makes it harder to visualize the environment and breaks the flow of the story, at least initially. A reasonable reference can go beyond just reality too, to popular sci-fi conventions. Everyone knows the concept of a teleportation device; why use an elaborate new term? This is one reason I like magical realism as a genre - it has fantastic elements, but is still grounded in the world that we know. It's a small complaint, but if you've had a long day or put away the book for a week or so, the last thing you want to do is struggle through language.

The love scenes are dreadful. In general, I'm not sure if love scenes are better or worse in book form versus a movie. In a book you can just skip over the scene and skim to find out where you need to pick up. But you can do this with a DVD too, and usually the scene selections are spaced so that you can skip right to the next segment. I think what makes books more painful is that you get to see exactly what the creator was thinking and trying to achieve with the scene. In a movie you can pass off the heavy petting as an attempt at drama, but in a book you get to see that his stroking was "passionate and wistful"; it tells you EXACTLY what to think. There's also the awkwardness of steering clear of slang while making sure it doesn't sound like a biology lesson or Napoleonic poetry. You know what I'm talking about.

I wonder why authors think romance strengthens a book. Do they think romance is more meaningful than brotherly love? I remember reading in a Morrissey interview that "There is a Light" wasn't a love song in the traditional sense, but meant more broadly. It's like when you switch the radio onto a Christian music station and it takes a minute to realize that they're singing about God, not a girlfriend. And why couldn't adventure be a motivator? Is adventure any less selfish?