Friday Four

1. I sometimes post beer recommendations here, but it is always only after rigorous testing and careful study.

But, if by "rigorous study", you mean "more than one tasting", I will have made an exception today by mentioning Black Albert, brewed by De Struise of Belgium. Depending on whom you believe at Beer Advocate, this one is either "world class" or merely "outstanding". I lean towards the former description, for this is a truly memorable beer.

Click to enlarge.

The label notes (above) say it all.

2. At $1799.00 it's ... out of my price range, but if I had money to burn, I couldn't think of a better kitchen gadget than one that would allow me to brew whatever I want in only four hours. An excerpt from a USA Today review of the "PicoBrew" reads in part:

Hit "brew" and walk away. The Internet-connected PicoBrew adds the ingredients based on the chosen recipe...

And lest the folks at Unclutterer cluck, this is no mere "unitasker". Apparently, it is "also great for Sous-Vide [sic] cooking".

3. He's making the country more like Soviet Russia every day, so I can't think of a people better-suited to poke fun at Barack Obama than the Russians.

And boy, do they nail him!

4. I don't condone vandalism, but the story about how a raccoon became an aardvark nevertheless makes interesting reading:

This kind of feedback loop--wherein an error that appears on Wikipedia then trickles to sources that Wikipedia considers authoritative, which are in turn used as evidence for the original falsehood--is a documented phenomenon. There's even a Wikipedia article describing it. Some of the most well-known examples involve Wikipedia entries for famous people, such as when users edited the article on the British actor Sacha Baron Cohen to say he had worked at Goldman Sachs. When a Wikipedia editor tried to remove the apocryphal detail, it took some convincing. Because it had since appeared in several articles on Cohen in the British press, the burden was on Wikipedians to disprove the myth. [link in original, minor format edits]

Amusingly, the next paragraph of the article mentions that the Internet encyclopedia had, for a long time, erroneously reported the birth date of its own founder. I love Wikipedia, but I love being sure of the truth more. For important matters, it is wise to seek multiple sources for factual information.

-- CAV