Oregon Hops

There's a good article in Willamette Week about the future of Oregon's hop industry and how it relates to craft brewing. It's nice to see people working toward getting the local industry going again, especially now that the "big boys" that usually dictate what varieties will be grown all being big foreign megacorps now. I hope the new hop efforts are successful and that we will end up with a thriving local industry and lots of great new varieties of hops available for home brewers too.

Album Cover

I should really stop reading Sadly, No...

Friday Funnies

There were a few good webcomics in my feed today:

• Cyanide & Happiness today is relevant to the new "Neckbeards 'n Blazers" trend that vs identified in her recent post.
• Wondermark has a good comic that certain cat people might enjoy.
• And Gunshow comes up with a voting system that Santorum would really get behind.

Disclaimer: Friday Funnies will most definitely not be a recurring feature. Offer not valid in Rhode Island. We have always been at war with Eurasia.

Death Squard

I was inspired by this comment over at Sadly, No!

Twinsies

This post over at TPM inspired me. Others have already pointed out Newt's resemblence to Baron Harkonnen of Dune, but I didn't know was that Newt is also working with Glossu 'Beast' Rabban. His campaign makes perfect sense to me now.

Didn't make the cut

I haz a sad that my blog didn't make the list of intertron sites that the DHS monitors to "gauge the mood of the online populace."  Maybe this will help:

Mood of the populace:  Pissed off.

I'm also really curious how you get to be on the team that monitors those sites.  Job posting:  "wanted, people willing to trollbrowse blogs all day.  Horrible spelling is a must."

And are Facebook (and Myspace?  Really?) on that list just so that any fed when caught updating their profile at work can just say "This? Oh, this is just a little project I'm working on for DHS."

And the fact that they "monitor" Youtube actually makes me hope all they're doing is watching funny animal videos all day, because if they actually read any of the comment threads over there they're going to get a very, uh, interesting view of the world... Hmm, that could explain some things now that I think about it. Crap...

Coming soon to a protest near you!

Has pepper-spraying non-violent protesters lost its charm? Do you long for that adrenaline rush you felt the first time you bashed some hippy in the head, but no matter how many heads you bash, it's just not the same?

Have no fear! Our delightfully precocious military is developing all sorts of exciting new "non-lethal" weapons that will soon be "trickling down" to your local campus police force and average rent-a-cop.

Will zapping hippies with microwave guns or the awesometastic-sounding "Distributed Sound and Light Array" give you that same rush? We'll have to wait and see, but I'm sure the average authoritarian rent-a-thug is already furiously masturbating while imagining the screams and sounds of sizzling hippy-flesh as he anticipates these exciting new developments in weapon technology.

Happy new year!