I've joined the NRA

So it’s been a while since I’ve made my mark. I suppose my last post was shortly after the first dusting of snow. Well, six months later and I’m pleased to report I’ve survived the bitter cold and crippling depression and have emerged into the light of Spring as not much worse for wear. There is still a ton of snow on the ground, but we are enjoying nearly sixteen hours of daylight at this point.

So a couple of weeks ago my friend, Clyde took my ptarmigan hunting in the mountains north of Fairbanks. Clyde, as Loren would confirm, is quite a winner. Here’s a guy who has some really poor decision-making skills (as evidenced by the fact that he has to start his car by blowing into a breathilizer) but at the same time is willing to wake up at 6am, after three hours of sleep and still drunk, and drive 80 miles to trudge through waste deep snow to find small, white tundra-pigeons. Many of us would hit the snooze button and roll right back over to that dream about Jay Davidson in a squirrel suit selling balloons on an aircraft carrier. The short of this is, this kid would make a great TKE if he was ever able to get into college.
Anyway, we drove two hours up the Steese Hwy and hiked another hour up the slopes of McManus Mountain. (No joke TKE's. That’s what it’s called.) There I spotted my first ptarmigan sitting still in the snow. It should be mentioned here that ptarmigan have evolved their survival strategy around the assumption that you cannot see them. (This may have worked for Dr. Grant against the T-Rex, but the same is not true for the sharp eyes of the T-VO.) Therefore, they are very easy to get close to and even easier to shoot. My excitement overrided my sense of sportsmanship and I proceeded to literally blow the head off the first one with my 20 gauge. Feeling a little guilty, I decided I would let the next one take flight before I shot it. So after happening on the next little whiter-than-snow dot on the mountainside, I tramped right up to it, hoping it would spring up when I got too close. But the goddamn bird just sat there. After about a minute I kicked my snow shoe at it and frightened it into flight before taking it down. This wasn’t hunting, it was like playing Wack-A-Mole if the mole’s didn’t move.

The next day, I got an email from a friend of mine in Scotland who is a nature photographer and he sent me a link to a photo essay he’s doing on the threatened Scottish Highland Ptarmigan.
More at http://www.chrisjohnstonephotographic.co.uk/latest/ptarmigan/ptarmigan.html.

As if my conscience needed any more badgering. So, I decided the most appropriate response was to send him this photo:


I haven’t heard back from him.

Anyway, I’d like to end this my offering a new beer to the mix. Alaskan Brewing has just released Alaskan White, a new wheat ale. I don’t know if I’ve had an Alaskan beer that has been bad, and this new one certainly fails to disappoint. It’s smooth and full like a Munich weisbier with the refreshing citrus finish of Blue Moon. It goes great with a slice of orange or lemon and compliments a basket of fried halibut and chips marvelously. It’s a great take on a European beer with and an American microbrew twist. This is definitely going to be my Summer beer of choice.

I look forward to hearing more from the rest of you all. Chad, keep it up, your posts are great. And I’ll say this again at the risk of sounding lonely and desperate, any of you are welcome to come visit in Alaska. My cabin is open even if I’m not around. You’ve got a 4-1/2 month window.

Cheers,
Todd

An Unlikely GBN Moment

What up ya'll? Hope this post finds you all scurrying around industriously at your various places of work and study, or as the case might be, at your residence of unemployment. I, for one, am still gainfully employed, though for the past ever so long I have done nothing that could either be considered scurrying or industrious. This week I've done roughly one hour of work while getting paid for upwards of 32. I have, however, said the word "Hello!" to at least 987 Japanese kids, taken the requisite number of breathes to continue on this mortal coil, learned 40 some new vocabulary words, and read about 48% of a Haruki Murakami novel (I was recently gifted a kindle by my parents and so now things like page numbers have become utterly obsolete). THIS JOB IS SO EASY!!! I also drank a beer. Let me tell you about it.

Let me preface telling you about it by saying that if it weren't for an utterly random link between this beer I drank and one of our fellow GBN bloggers it would be a fully uninteresting story. It is, however, fairly illustrative of the dearth of Good Beer to be had in this country. Cutting to the chase. Last week we had a gathering, not unlike all those GBN's I never attended but heard vague details about, I imagine, of some English teachers in the city I work in. Bring some beer, bring yourself, come to my apartment, be quiet enough so that you don't wake my crotchety old neighbor who will call the police on us. That's me heavily paraphrasing my friend Jordan. So, I mosey my way on over to Jordan's place, stopping in at the supermarket next to his house on the way to pick up some beer. Generally the selection of beers anywhere in Japan is quite pitiful. You've got your Asahi, which is pretty much Budweiser, your Kirin, which floats somewhere between, well, no it's also Budweiser, and then you've got your Yebisu, the Emperor of Beers, but unfortunately, you got it right, it's just the King of Beers dressed like a Shogun. If you're lucky sometimes you can find Guiness. In a can.

This supermarket, however, has a couple beers that aren't made in Japan and so therefore aren't boring as fuck, so I stumble my way over to the beer aisle (I'm still pretty jet-lagged at this point and have been awake since probably 4 AM), head straight to the foreign section and select the most expensive thing I can find without looking at it. I'm still unfortunately pretty well brain-washed into thinking that more expensive is always better, and at around 600 yen (six bucks) for beer about 2/3 the size of your standard Deschutes product I'm expecting this shit to be ambrosial. I buy a tall boy of one of the Bud-clones to complete the package (yep, the total of 2 beers is a standard night out for me theseadays) and get over to Jordan's apartment.

I get there, and immediately locate a bottle opener with which to crack my prize purchase and savor the nectar within. A couple minutes of searching and I'm plopped down on the coach, breathing in the heady scent of my as of yet untasted, even unnamed beer. I look around at everybody else, drinking their gin and tonics, or their Sapporos, quickly looking past my friend Taylor, a beer guru who has good beer imported from America so he doesn't have to drink Kisutone Raito like the rest of us plebians, and finally come back to the beer in my hands, mentally patting myself on the back for going the extra mile and getting myself this treat. I think you know where this is going. Down the hatch and OH FUCK THIS IS GROSS! Shit, what the hell does this taste like? Skull Splitter? No, not that bad, but jesus christ it's a barley wine that's been stuffed with daisy petals and left in a some foppish flemish dude's perfumed basement to rot. I look down at the bottle and here is what I see.
ai


A beer with a picture of a medieval chick on it that claims to be a product of the flemish art of brewing. Rathwell, don't ever try to brew a flemish beer. They are doing something very wrong. Something strikes me about the bottle that I, in my airplane induced daze and god-knows-what-induced inability to be a discerning consumer, didn't look at before. Looking at the label closer....



Duchesse De Bourgogne. Good luck pronouncing that shit. But something tells me I shouldn't be so hasty with this label. Something is familiar... Maybe you guessed immediately, but I stared at it for about 10 minutes, my taxed brain going in and out of consciousness until a bell finally rang and this silly string of words snapped into sense. Duchesse De Bourgogne... Duchess of Burgoyne! Haha, how about that? What are the chances. Marnie, you've got yourself a flemish beer that I'm sure nobody in... Flames? Where the hell do Flemish things come from? Scandanavians, at any rate, sure don't drink it, but dummies in Japan will. Cheers, folks, hope everything is going well and the blessed combination of a burgeoning spring and the Mariners running away with the AL West (just knocked on wood) has got everybody on cloud nine.