Friday Four

1. Once again, I was amused enough by a beer's name -- Long Strange Tripel -- to give it a try. And, once again, like the folks at Beer Advocate, I was very impressed. Boulevard Brewing Company offers the following explanation of the name:

Lately it occurs to us that if, back in 1989, you planned on starting a brewery in the back of your carpentry shop, you'd been wise to seek out someone like Harold "Trip" Hogue. A collector of ancient Volvos, Trip was well qualified for the make-do engineering required to coax recalcitrant equipment out of retirement and into making the first Boulevard beers. Today, he is our longest-tenured employee. We offer this rich, golden Tripel in grateful tribute to dedication, everywhere.

In addition, the brewers describe its sensory profile, among other things:

A golden-amber colored, full bodied beer with an intense fruity aroma of bananas, a prominent sweet malt flavor containing a hint of toffee, and a low to medium citrusy hop flavor and bitterness.

Boulevard is located in Kansas City, which is among the places my wife is interviewing for a permanent position, so I may have already performed a vital piece of research about my future home...

2. I swear I'm not slowly transforming my Friday post series into a myth-busting campaign, but this was too good to pass up:

... My all-time favorite Eleanor Gould query was on Christmas Gifts for Children: the writer had repeated the old saw that every Raggedy Ann doll has "I love you" written on her little wooden heart, and Eleanor wrote in the margin that it did not, and she knew, because as a child she had performed open-heart surgery on her rag doll and seen with her own eyes that nothing was written on the heart.

I'm not sure which aspect of this I relished more: the silliness of the myth or the method of debunking it.

3. A LEGO fan has exhaustively analyzed prices per brick over time and written up his results. He concludes:

If all the signs lead to the price of LEGO not increasing over time, then why is there a common belief that it has? I have a couple of hypotheses:

1. Children who were bought LEGO as gifts are now old enough to buy it for themselves and for others as gifts and they are surprised by the price.
2. The advent of collectible LEGO sets and the internet has driven the secondary market of LEGO through the roof. [minor edits]

His economic analysis, although very interesting, is not the only reason to stop by. There's lots of other interesting historical background, too.

4. Inter alia, from a post on mumbling as data compression:

This kind of linguistic data compression is not limited to pronunciation: It also drives decisions about whether to utter or omit certain words. You're far more likely to specify that your neighbor is a female police officer or a male nurse than if the genders were reversed. Since most police officers have been male and most nurses female, historically, gender is fairly predictable in the usual case; precious cognitive energy is reserved for the anomalous cases, where the words male and female are more useful.

Oops! The author forgot to mention that data compression in speech also offends egalitarian sensibilities. Obviously, this insidious practice must be stamped out!

-- CAV