Non Sequitur

Usually, the audio files I transcribe make sense to me. The moderator is representing some company, and they're developing a new product: a new toothbrush, a new drug, a new car - whatever. The moderator asks probing questions designed to get honest opinions about various aspects of the product with as little bias as possible. Pretty simple. And since I have to listen to the audio file in order to type it, I can't help but analyze it as I go, trying to figure out what each question is really designed to do.

If I'm very, very lucky, I can get myself into a mental state where I'm not actively listening to what I'm hearing, yet am still able to type it in a kind of dazed state as my wind wanders. Of course, since I'm typing it and hearing it, sometimes I'll get jolted back into reality when I miss something or don't understand something.

Recently, I was typing a long, long file (3 hours, which is about 10 hours of work), and I was cruising, about an hour through, really in the zone, just typing with nary a care in the world. From what I'd gathered, the moderator, a woman with a thick German accent, was talking to 3 men about their hair, or lack thereof. Apparently all three of these guys were balding. They talked for an hour about going bald, how it felt to lose hair, how they approached their stylists, and how they felt about approaching their stylists. It was pretty gay. But thankfully I was in the zone, not really listening. Then something happened - it was not just a shock, it was a lightning bolt, as I was jarred back to reality and went, "Wait - what? Did I just hear that?" Here is what the moderator said, typed verbatim, and when you read it, hear it in your mind being spoken by a woman with a thick eastern European accent:

Moderator: OK, guys, let’s take a trip to the board back there. We’re going to actually leave this galaxy. We are going into the hair loss galaxy, and while we’re there we’re going to visit 4 planets. On the first planet, we’re going to visit the anti-thinning planet. The anti-thinning planet in the hair loss galaxy. You’ve just landed: get off your space shuttle, or whatever we’re traveling in, and we step on this planet, what do we see?

As I rewound the tape, making sure I'd heard correctly, my mind went through this rapid-fire series of thoughts: Did I just hear that? OK, I did. I feel stupid even typing this. I'm worried I might actually get dumber if I type this. Holy shit - serious people with actual jobs wrote this question. People in charge of things at a major company. Fuck. Somebody at this company thought this was a good idea, and other people agreed. There were probably memos. Holy shit, people are fucking idiots. I hate people. I hate people, so, so much.

But wait, it gets even better. The three guys don't even blink. They just jump right in, albeit with fairly predictable answers:

Respondent 1: People with a lot of hair.

HAHA! ZING! Got 'em. Can't argue with that! On the anti-thinning planet in the Hair Loss Galaxy, there will be PEOPLE WITH LOTS OF HAIR. Oh, Respondent 1, you clever, clever man. Next, the moderator starts probing about the planet. What's it like there? What colors do you see? What do people do there? There's a lot of hair stylists there, says one of the guys. Then we get this exchange:

Moderator: Any other professions that we observe on planet anti-thinning?

Respondent 2: Models.

Moderator: Hair models?

Respondent 2: No, just models.

Moderator: What are they doing there?

Respondent 2: Modeling.

Moderator: And why, why are they on this planet?

Respondent 2: They’re tanning.

Moderator: And just to be sure I understand why they’re models there –

Respondent 2: Because they have beautiful hair.

Respondent 3: They could have an ugly face, but they have beautiful hair.

What the fuck kind of inane bullshit is this? Again, I am forced to ask myself, WHY are you asking these questions? It almost sounds like she's getting the backdrop for a commercial, but are you really going to script a commercial based on the first thing that comes out of the mouths of 3 random guys from Chicago?

Now we get to what I consider the best part of this unfolding saga:

Moderator: I’m afraid we have to leave that planet. We’re going to the medical planet. The medical planet, in our hair-loss galaxy, so you step off the medical planet, what do we see there?

Respondent 1: People walking around in coats, I don’t know.

Moderator: Why coats?

Respondent 1: With scissors, and samples of our hair.

Moderator: Mike, I’m afraid with this pen I can’t hear you. What did you say?

Respondent 1: They want to take samples of our hair, maybe trying to look at the DNA, trying to see if there’s any similarity in the genetic code of hair. Trying to find similarities with women and men’s hair loss, and maybe seeing if there are similarities regardless of sex.

Respondent 2: There’s no models. There’s probably more people that are having more problematic hair that don’t have a lot, that are trying to save what they have.

Respondent 3: There are a lot of people with treatments on their scalps, bandages on their heads.

Respondent 1: There’s electrodes going on there too. Oils, lasers –

............

OK, so is it just me, or does this sound less like three guys talking about hair-care products and more like the delusional ramblings of three paranoid lunatics with alien abduction experiences? I was having a hard time typing this section, as I was giggling pretty much nonstop. I kept expecting one of the guys to just snap, Travis Walton-style, and start screaming, "THEY COME FOR ME AT NIGHT! SPACE SUITS...SPACE SUITS!!!!!!1"

Actually, what I really wanted wanted was for one of the guys to stand up in the middle of the moderator's rambling narrative about the fantastical Hair Galaxy and the mythical anti-thinning planet, just stand up and say, "Hey, wait a second! This is BULLSHIT! Let's get right the fuck out of here! YARRGH!" (that last part is him transforming into a dinosaur. I have a very active imagination)

Anyway. My job has no redeeming qualities other than the fact that I don't have to go anywhere, but my loss is your gain. And by "gain," I mean, "Wasted a full 6 minutes of your time, or 15 in Luke's case because he's a slow reader who I'm pretty sure still sounds out the longer words."

Going International: Snow Monkeys, Temples, and A Couple Swigs of Supposedly Summer Mikans

Well, that was quite the long title, I suppose, but once you get going with colons and shit it's hard to stop. Yes, this is Chad, posting from a far distant land much better known for it's sake than it's beer, and for temples and geishas and other cultural treasures even more than that, perhaps, but nevertheless, I'm writing to say that good beer night can in fact transcend national boundaries. Or should I say, we're writing? Well, right now it's just me because Marnie is busy cleaning my breakfast dishes (and seeing how she can't really type for beans it'll mostly be me anyways) but the sentiment is certainly plural.

So, beer? I suppose there are a few ways we could break Marnie's trip out here into segments, but for the purposes of the good beer blog I guess it makes sense to use the few times we drank alcohol as landmarks. This is going to be a long fucking post.

Stage One: Sapporo Gold



We started things off right with this delicate amber blend of hops (?) and barley (maybe?) that tastes like nothing less than the dregs of a thirty rack of the Best Chest. Yep, in general Japanese beer looks like piss and tastes like it too, so, hey, Keystone goes international, too, it seems. Wanna comment on that Marnie? No. Spot on.

However, a lot has to be said for the effect of atmosphere in improving the quality of an otherwise thin, barely alcoholic can of water sprinkled with yellow food-coloring, and we had atmosphere in spades. Picture this intimate scene: you find yourself walking down a brilliantly lit festival street, shop keepers to either side hawking Hello Kitty purses, cheap samurai-swords, postcards plastered with images of Fuji, the Kinkakuji, Harajuku at night and various other popular spots, and maybe a few pokemon-themed carnival masks, people calling out to you in a language that manages to communicate a headache, but not much else. Take a left, and escape into a side-street. The stalls are gone, but the lights and hanging lanterns aren't. Take a right, and stumble into relative blackness. The party's over. Or is it? Look up, and in the darkness you see a bright white sign that says something Chad can read but you can't. It says, "Kamogawa Family Inn." You've arrived. Our room was a study in the elegance of the marshes: tatami mats, tree-branches stuck directly to walls, thin paper walls enclosing two ... Ok, thankfully Marnie is here to look over my shoulder and tell me when I get too apostrophic and retarded, so, let's skip to the beer. It sucked. But we drank it out of teacups like dilletantes and it felt... classy? Whatever.



Stage Two: There's no Beer here, just Monkeys and Magic Apples

I defer... Hey, it's marnie. Chad's too wordy, so I get to do this part. So, we went from tokyo to nagano to see the snow monkeys (aka japanese macaques). They like to lounge around in hot springs and it's the cutest thing ever. In this monkey park that we went to, they get fed 3 times a day and their monkey bath gets cleaned daily. They have a pretty cushy life and in return they ignore all the people taking pictures of them with cell phones about a foot away from their faces and just go about their monkey business. They just scurry about your feet and fight and hug each other for warmth and just be freaking adorable. As, chad said, there is no beer in this story, but I really like the monkeys.




This picture is sort of misleading because it doesn't show how close you can really get to the monkeys (or how close they get to you), but chad's camera died before we got close so that's all we got. I have a lot of pictures and videos, but I can't put them up. Oh well, just look them up on youtube. They're great. We almost saw one rip a japanese baby's face off when her parents let her toddle off and she tried to pet a monkey. That's it about monkeys for now. We also discovered that this part of japan grows great apples. I mean really fucking good. UNBELIEVABLE. I'm addicted to them like crack. Here is a picture of it.



As you can see from that ecstatic face, they're good. So good, in fact, that fifteen minutes later...




You'd think that look of long-suffering might be a result of being dressed up like a Japanese doll, but, it's actually just apple-withdrawal. She stole at least three more after that.

Stage Three: New Years Eve

You'd think Japan would be a crazy place to party on New Year's Eve, but it turns out that you might find more energy and excitement in a small village in Ghana. 11:35 and aside from a few lonely sheets of paper fluttering around in the wind there was nothing moving on Hamamatsu's main party street (which is usually just rocking, let me tell you). There was a drunk British guy raving about "getting holy," which I think is a euphemism for boning his Japanese girlfriend in a public toilet, though I'm not sure. He claimed he went to a temple to hear the bells, but the hands he kept enthusiastically clapping on my shoulders smelled a little fishy, that's all I'm saying. Like he wasn't telling the truth about something, you know? Whatever, that story was stupid and mostly a lie (there's really little doubt that that dude went to a temple to "hear the bells"). To cut to the quick, we did some stuff with some people, it was sort of unremarkable, we tried to go to a bar, they were pretty much all closed, we found one that was run by a very affable Turkish man who gave us free apple kool-aid that he claimed was champagne, then left the bar and told us we could go behind and just help ourselves, then shit got boring and we left to drink the good beer that I had been saving for months, just for this very occasion. Was it good, Marnie? "Meh." That about sums it up. Shizuoka Summer Mikan Ale.



It tasted a lot better than Sapporo Gold, that's for sure, but I wouldn't exactly say that I was smacked in the face with a blast of tangeriney-freshness, either. It tasted like a Red Hook ESB. Good, but otherwise unremarkable. Sigh. Check out this fucking cake, though. It's fucking cute.



It's a Christmas cake. Japanese people think we eat them in America.

Last Segment: Sake in Welch's Jam Cups (really pretty ones)
So this is marnie again. We were in a train station and there was a liquor store and we went in and were immediately drawn to these cheap glass cups of sake. We spent about 10 minutes picking out the prettiest cups (mine has lilies and chad's has fireworks and mountains). Well, we took them back to our inn, but it's against the rules to drink or eat in our rooms so we had to be silent and most importantly, we had to finish the entire thing once we opened them because they was no way to get rid of it otherwise. They were about 16 percent alcohol, but they weren't that big, so we just prayed they would be drinkable. Well, they sort of were. It tasted like soy sauce with the salt replaced by alcohol. The worst part was that they got nastier and nastier as we powered on. By the end we were shuddering as we gulped it down completely sober.

Surprisingly sober, actually. You'd figure after downing a sizable glass container of clearly alcoholic liquid we'd at least be feeling a little bit stumbly, right? Especially Marnie, her limit is usually about two sips of beer, so three plus shots of sake should have seen her singing Kelly Clarkson songs at the top of her lungs while doing somersaults around the room. But, yeah nothhhhhhhhhhhhhhhiiiiiiiiiii oh fuck. When the drunk hit, it was like a bullet of giggle gas, and considering that the walls of that inn were made of millenia-old papyrus, if the other guests didn't know we had been drinking in our room, than they must have thought we were both really fucking funny people. Then we found 5,000 yen.

Well, that's that in a pretty large nutshell. Tomorrow we're going to my school, so maybe there will soon be another post on here entitled "When Marnie met the kid who humps fire escapes," but that'll have to wait for another day. May the fifty foot tall spirit of the Vairocana Buddha be with you always.

The Chronicles of Marnia Continues

Take a gander at this picture of Paris Hilton and her new pink Bentley. Notice anything special about this tabloid photo? Well, check out the little hungry girl in the background wearing her lime green REI windbreaker headed home for lunch from her job at the children's bookstore. Yep, that's me. As I waited to cross the street, I saw her pull up (who didn't) and as I crossed she began to get out, and I thought, "oh shit, there are about 30 people taking pictures of me". So today I checked out my favorite gossip blog (socialite life) and lo and behold, there I was. Honestly, I was more excited than I should have been. I love that blog, almost as much as I love this blog. Unfortunately it was kind of hard to get home and there was some inconvenient and awkward shuffling past Paris, her new BFF (seriously, and have you seen that show?), and all the photogs. It's just so hard being famous, what can I say.
Continuing my glamorous life of seasonal gift wrapping, errand running (today my boss at the bookstore actually sent me to another bookstore to buy a book), and cat vaccinating, I'm going to japan in two days to pay chado sensei a little visit, so I'm sure that we'll write soon. He's saving a nice beer for us to share so I'm sure we'll tell you all about it. I was actually going to write earlier about this beer that my dad has been drinking lately. It was going to be a silly little piece on an exTKE enjoying a miraculously %14 beer in his golden years, but it turns out that two months ago he went to USC homecoming and got completely wasted at the TKE tent beforehand on bacardi 151. He forgot to eat breakfast and lunch and only remembers getting to his seat before the game, realizing he was going to puke and running to the bathroom. The next 5 hours I guess are a blur. He was carried home by his old roomate (a doctor) and brought home to my stepmother (also a doctor) where they monitored him for a few hours before deciding he didn't need to go to the hospital. Needless to say, he hasn't been drinking for a while. By the way, my dad only threw up from drinking once before (on his 21st birthday). Moral of the story is, nothing ever changes... except your alcohol tolerance. TKE forever or whatever. Can't wait to be there to take all of you to the hospital when you make bad decisions at the age of 54. Awwwwwwww. Love Marnie

Whitman GBN Invitation

I know it's a long stretch, but I want to formally invite everyone to the Condemned House Monday night at 10pm for GBN, which will include the beer Eli and I brewed this semester. Despite a disappointing sip during the bottling process and a mediocre taste before leaving for Thanksgiving, the IPA has turned into a decent beer by all accounts since Thanksgiving.
I have only reentered the world of drinking on Friday after finishing my thesis, so I have no other beer updates, but perhaps after Monday's GBN I will provide a more inlightening report.
Cheers to all. And cheers to good beers in Walla Walla!

Part 3 of a 12 Part Series, "The Couch"

Two Recently Miniaturized Scientists Watch Fantastic Voyage

Rupert the Scientist: My God, Watson! It appears our experiment has gone terribly, terribly awry!

Chet the Scientist: omg this fucking sucks

Rupert the Scientist: This is incredible - we've somehow re-oriented our spatial coordinates!

Chet the Scientist: yea we're really small

Rupert the Scientist: What in God's name are we going to do, Watson?

Chet the Scientist: dude my name isn't watson

Rupert: (grabbing Chet's shoulders and furiously shaking them) What are we going to do, Watson?!

Chet: y do you keep calling me that

Rupert: Calm down, Watson! OK, OK...we're going to be calm about this. Calm, and rational. We'll just deal with this problem like we deal with every problem...

Chet: fuck no we're not watching that stupid movie again

Rupert: ...by watching the greatest movie in the history of mankind, Fantastic Voyage!

Chet: no that movie is teh suck, you can lick my nuts

Rupert: Insert the tape, Watson!

Chet: fist yourself

Rupert: Thank you, Watson!

(The movie begins playing)

Chet: dude how did you do that

Dr. Duval: Yet all the suns that light the corridors of the universe shine dim before the blazing of a single thought...
Grant: - proclaiming in incandescent glory the myriad mind of Man...
Dr. Michaels: Very poetic, gentlemen. Let me know when we pass the soul.
Dr. Duval: The soul? The finite mind cannot comprehend infinity - and the soul, which comes from God, is infinite.
Dr. Michaels: Yes, well, our time isn't.

Chet: o snap

Rupert: This movie is drowning in majesty!

Chet: raquel welch was really hot. i would tap that like a mafia phone line

Rupert: Do not defile the sacred vessel of the Blessed Cora Peterson, Assistant to the Handsome and Godly Dr. Peter Duval!

Chet: shut ur face, crazy man

[Near the end of them movie, the intrepid crew escapes their ruined submarine through a teardrop, escaping in the nick of time and reverting to normal size]

Rupert: Now, Watson, if you once again INSIST on pointing out that tiny logical inconsistency in an otherwise brilliant film, I shall become very cross.

Chet: y didn't the sub get bigger and crack that dude's skull like a ping pong ball under a freight locomotive

Rupert: That's IT, Watson, that's absolutely the last straw!

Chet: if you call me Watson 1 more time i am going to flip out

Rupert: Prepare yourself, insolent cur!

Chet: for what, u hack, u cant do anything, do u think u r a wizard or something -

[Chet explodes]

Rupert: Yes. I am a wizard! I put on my robe and my wizard hat!

Good beer?

It snowed today! I'm using a pretty liberal definition of snow, but from what I've gathered, the flurries that I saw out the window today are pretty rare down here in Nashville. I thought I'd celebrate the magic of the season with some tasty winter beer, but I found Georgia Moon Corn Whiskey (Less than 30 days old!) at the store instead. I've never seen alcohol sold in mason jars before. I feel like it's very Whitman hippie recycler meets Southern hick moonshiner. I haven't tried it yet...I'll wait for the snow to start sticking to the ground. Miss you all!

Turkey Day!

Just something that will hopefully bring a smile to your faces.

And in true sappy-Luke form, let me say that I am particularly thankful and honored to call you all my friends. Happy Thanksgiving!

In Thanksgiving Tradition, Bush Pardons Scooter Libby In Giant Turkey Costume