Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Like my brownhouse:
   the kind of french fries they serve at fancy restaurants
Saturday, April 28 2012
Back in the late summer or early autumn, I'd gotten out of bed and found an unusual dead animal on the bedroom floor. Unlike the usual voles or shrews (or occasional Flying Squirrel) that Clarence the cat kills and drags in through the pet door, this had been some species of bat. Though it had clearly died, it had also appeared to be uninjured, so I'd thought it possible that it had flown in and then died of old age. I hadn't really cared; my main interest in it was to retrieve its skull. So I'd put it in an open plastic container up on the solar deck to rot. But it hadn't really rotted all that much; in the end I'd produced a mummified bat. Today I took that mummy and soaked it for a few minutes in boiling water, after which it was easy to separate the skin from the bones. Once I had a reasonably-clean skull, I photographed it atop a dime for scale. I did this out on the hood of the Subaru, where the sunlight was brilliant and I could be sure Ramona wouldn't run up and grab it. Amazingly, it looks like a tiny dog skull, complete with large canine teeth:

Compare it to a Deer Mouse skull, which I also have:

This afternoon Gretchen and I drove out to Shady (the sub-hamlet between Bearsville and Willow out on Route 212 West) to attend an art opening at the Elena Zang Gallery. Today's opening featured the works of three or four photographers, only one of whom (David Hall) I knew for his beautiful obsessively-composed underwater photographs. I'm not easily wowed by photographs, and Halls were the only ones that stood out in today's exhibit. Also worthy of appreciation was the grounds of the gallery, which was bisected by a brook and had been landscaped with tiers of bluestone and decorated with sculptures. There was also a residence associated with the gallery and associated with that residence was freshly-rescued puppy, a Coonhound/Rottweiler mix with long floppy ears and enormous paws. Her name was Cleo. Part of what makes an opening like this one such a pleasant experience is the generally liberal supply of wine, which makes the inevitable encounters with people with insistently-horrible senses of humor that much more bearable. Don't tell me you don't know a few people like that. The weather was just a little on the cool side, but it was sunny and thus pleasant so long as one avoided the shade.
Our friends Nancy and Sarah the Vegan were doing yoga nearby at Jiva Mukti Yoga and the plan was to maybe meet them at 5:30 for drinks at the Bear. But Shady is in a timewarp and cellphones are as useless there as they would have been in 1993, so we ended up driving into Jiva Mukti and running our dogs in the woods for ten or fifteen minutes hoping we'd catch Nancy and Sarah. Their respective cars were parked outside, but they were still somewhere in the building, and even Gretchen knows better than to barge in on yoga when it's already in progress. So we went to the Bear on our own.
At the Bear we sat at the bar and Gretchen had an overpriced mediocre bloody mary while I had the only IPA available, a Hurricane Kitty. Hurricane Kitty used to be my favorite beer, but I've had so much experience with great IPAs over the last couple of years that Hurricane Kitty now seems kind of ordinary to me. It's possible, of course, that there was something wrong with the Bear's keg or plumbing, and it also bears noting that they were serving it too cold. IPAs are best at around 60 degrees Fahrenheit (room temperature in our house most of the year).
I was famished, so we ordered onion rings, which I proceeded to pop into my mouth one after the other. They were delicious. I was about half way through those when Nancy and Sarah arrived. They ordered glasses of wine and, since the onion rings had dwindled away, french fries. But the problem with french fries in a place trying to be as classy as the Bear tries to be is that they're just never very good. You know the kind I mean. These misbegotten pretenders each have a strip of potato skin on their spines and they tend to be a little floppy, devoid of that thin outer layer of fryer-induced crispiness that every fry has a God-given right to have. Why do fancy restaurants insist on peddling terrible fries? In the past Gretchen and I have had good experiences at the Bear, but that was back when she ate cheese and I ate fish and didn't care too much about beer. At this point the only value it has for us is its atmosphere. The bar is very cozy and surprisingly inviting, and in warm weather there's also that outdoor seating on the north bank of the Sawkill.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?120428

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