A carnival of technology

I finally bought a carbon monoxide detector. I’ve been meaning to get one for a while. My apartment is gas-fired, and I don’t trust the water heater and stove and whatever else to always combust perfectly.

I paid about $40 and got the kind that just plugs in. There was another detector for about $15 more that also claims to detect explosive gases, but I figure the explosive gases smell like something, so I didn’t get that. I don’t know how to tell whether or not this thing works. I pushed the test button and it simulated 400ppm of CO and the alarm freaked out, but I don’t know that it’s actually detecting carbon monoxide. The other button, the one that displays the detection memory, says that it’s so far detected zero particles of carbon monoxide. I guess that’s good, but I thought there might be at least a little bit floating around.

This detector also has a feature where I can test or silence the alarm by holding the volume button on my TV remote for five seconds. I’m not really comfortable with this. Five seconds of changing the volume probably represents the full range of my TV, but it seems like having an alarm go off when I’m trying to hear some movie dialouge is counterproductive.

Back in 1786, some dude in Turin, a helper in a liquor store, decided that it’d be a good idea to take some perfectly good wine, moscato in his case, and add some wormwood and sugar and herbs and who knows what else. Vermouth was born. In 1813, Joseph Noilly set out to recreate at home the process that gave wines shipped by sea a fuller body and amber color, and thus dry, or French, vermouth was born. Oddly enough Joseph Noilly’s brand, Noilly Prat, and the most famous remaining Torino vermouth, Martini & Rossi, are today owned by the same company. Another oddity is that people today seem terrified of vermouth.

Perhaps there’s been a shift in our collective taste away from the bitter. I admit that I might share in this. One of the first cocktails I tried with an appreciable amount of vermouth was the first alphabetically on the IBA website, the Americano. Formerly the Milano-Torino, named for the origins of its sweet vermouth (Cinzano in the case of the original) and Campari bitters, Gaspare Campari renamed the drink to “Americano” because apparently early 20th century Americans dug it. I found the Americano to be a bit of a challenge. I used Martini & Rossi rather Cinzano, but I don’t think that would have made a difference. Campari is intensely, unabashedly bitter. It was interesting, and I can see how such a drink would serve well as a slow, careful apéritif, but I have a hard time believing that my brothers and sisters in corn whiskey and apple pie would have ordered more than one. Early 20th century tourists in Milan were probably crazy rich, though, so maybe it’s just that rich people like things that taste bad. I eventually came to terms with Campari and found that a splash of it in a glass of orange juice wasn’t so bad, but what really surprised me about this experience was that I was ok with the vermouth on its own. I view it kind of like gin with a base of wine instead of grain alcohol. It’s not something that I’d drink on its own, but it adds an interesting, and sometimes even sweet, flavor to cocktails.

Vermouth was used in a lot of pre-prohibition cocktails, most notably the Martini—gin and vermouth—and the Manhattan—rye, vermouth and bitters. Vermouth has been demonized in more recent years, with Churchill perhaps being the most famous opponent. Apocryphal quotes tell of him creating martinis consisting of a glass of gin and a wave of the glass over a bottle of vermouth, or even just a nod to a bottle of vermouth across the room or a wave in the general direction of France. That’s not a martini; it’s a glass of cold gin, and it didn’t make Churchill a cocktail hero; it just made him a drunk. Whether Churchill’s alleged martini recipes were true or not is unimportant; the modern martini mistakes “dry” to mean an absence of vermouth rather than the presence of dry vermouth, with perhaps the worst manifestation being just a cold glass of vodka, tasting like nothing in particular. The martini has become more of a glass used to serve fruity concoctions than a drink, and I think we need a return to vermouth. A dry martini used to be something full of flavors, a menagerie of herbs and botanicals in both the gin and the vermouth, a classy sipping drink rather than just a delivery system for tasteless alcohol.

With the manhattan vermouth is at least remembered, but there have been a couple of interesting changes over the course of history. The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book describes a manhattan as follows:

• Dash of Orange Bitters
• One-half Italian Vermouth
• One-half Rye Whiskey (Stir)
• Serve with Maraschino Cherry

“Italian Vermouth” is sweet, red vermouth, which is still available today, and the current idea of the Maraschino cherries might not be the same as it was in 1900, but it’s just a garnish and doesn’t add much flavor, so that doesn’t matter. As for the other two ingredients, rye whiskey was badly hurt by Prohibition, almost disappearing in favor of bourbon. Bourbon or Canadian whiskey usually serves as the base of the drink nowadays. The orange bitters are also hard to find, and Angostura bitters are usually used instead.

According to Bob Skilink’s Beer & Food: An American History, American beer has had a history of sucking really bad. The colonists didn’t have access to good malts, and once the engines of agriculture and production advanced to the point that the drinks became palatable, the Volstead act shut everything down. The rise of microbrews, both by making their own beers and shaming larger breweries into creating better products, have since put us at the point where it’s easy to find an American beer able to stand up next to its German, English or Belgian cousins, but I don’t believe time has been as kind to the cocktail. America has always been pretty good at making a good distilled libation. While England was trying to figure out how to turn unaged spirits into cheap gin, America was perfecting ways to age liquor made from that ubiquitous New World grain, maize, and drinking the finest rum of the Caribbean. Pre-prohibition cocktails, an American invention, sought to create drinks that complemented rather than covered the tastes of their base liquors. Sure, the goal of some of the forgotten recipes was to disguise the taste of bathtub gin, but pre-prohibition American inventions like the old fashioned, the manhattan and the martini attempted to use the tastes of their spirits as an ingredient rather than an alcohol delivery system to be hidden. Basically what I’m saying is that the drunks at the turn of the 20th century had some class, and we’d do well to relearn their lessons.

Rye is easy enough to obtain for a manhattan. There are several companies that still produce rye whiskey. My favorite among the ones that I’ve tried is Old Overholt, now a subsidiary of Jim Beam but otherwise a company that claims a (non-contiguous, at least officially) history of over 150 years beginning in 1810. Michael Jackson (the drinker, not the singer) gave it a good score though wished it was brave enough to be more of a rye. Weighing in at a respectable 23 Bodines it makes an appropriate mixer. Orange bitters, on the other hand, have joined my list of things I’d like to obtain to make old-timey cocktails.

Said list is more or less now the following:

Orange bitters. This is basically a blend of orange peel and herbs, and there are still some made though I’ve never seen it in stores. Drinkboy has a recipe along with some links to manufacturers, though the one he recommends has prices in Euros which, thank to bad home loans or some crap like that, means expensive for me. Maybe I’ll buy some with that $25 Mastercard owes me for scamming me on currency conversion if I ever see it.

Peychaud bitters. This one shows up a lot in New Orleans cocktails. It’s still made, but I’ve never seen them, so it’s probably going to have to be another Internet order.

Gomme syrup. I’ve written about this before, and my conclusion was basically that I just need to buy some gum arabic and make my own, which doesn’t seem terribly difficult. I’ve not yet done this. I haven’t seen gomme syrup appear as much in the Waldorf-Astoria manual as the supposedly modern IBA recipes, but I would like to try it in a daiquiri, perhaps once the weather warms up again.

Old Tom gin. This is sort of a weird one. Supposedly in 16th century England there were some bars ahead of their time that had an early idea of a vending machine. On their outside walls they would install a pipe marked by a black cat, “Old Tom,” and thirsty travelers could drop a penny into a slot, hold their mouth under a pipe and, once the bartender noticed the rattling coin, receive a mouthful of a sweetened gin. Some theories hold that the sugar was there to cover up a really bad taste in the gin, but it still shows up in some recipes, most notably the Tom Collins, even though good gin should have been readily available by then. Internet says that there are a few Old Tom makers remaining, though how close their products are to what people drank on London street corners is unclear, and I’ve never seen any in Georgia. I’m not sure what to do here or if I should even care.

Sloe gin. This isn’t really a gin, but more of a brandy made from sloe plums. I haven’t really looked very hard for it, so it might be available in the store down the road for all I know.

Absinthe. This I have mixed feelings about. It’s unavailable because it’s illegal, and, as the favorite of several famous artists and writers, it has a lot of legend attached to it. I’m skeptical of the claims that the wormwood produces hallucinations; the descriptions of the experiences tend to land somewhere between those found with regular alcohol consumption or delirium tremens, and supposedly there wasn’t that much wormwood in the old stuff to begin with. There are a few ways to get around the laws, either by buying from shady European producers willing to ignore US postal regulations or from a few American distillers that have found ways to supposedly make authentic product while following the very edge of the law, but absinthe seems to appeal and be marketed more to people looking to recreate the depression of Poe than people looking for old-timey booze. I have had absinthe once that was imported, probably legally, by someone who had visited Hungary. I wasn’t impressed. I suspect that anisette would serve as a perfect equivalent in recipes, and, to be honest, I don’t like the taste of aniseed.

So that’s about where I stand with my booze experiments. The Christmas season suggests that I should try egg nog, but, though I don’t share the fear of raw eggs that seemed to come out of nowhere in the ’90s, I’m uneasy about mixing milk and liquor. I think I’ll stick with manhattans made with Angostura for now.

So, that bike thing. I guess it’s been nearly a month, so I might as well post some of my thoughts.

It’s exhilarating. There’s a real freedom and thrill in traveling out in the elements that a car just can’t capture. Biking was a lot harder than I remembered starting off, and the one leg is still a little skinnier than the other, but I think I’m back close enough to where I was before. There was a moment on Monday a week or two ago when, even though I’d awoken from too little sleep after my usual Sunday-night insomnia, groggy, a little nauseous, once I got on the bike I felt like I could go forever, I piloted the bicycle up severe inclines with unflagging speed, cooked Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes and performed all manner of other feats. For that little moment on a gloomy Monday, I felt alive, and that’s what really makes it worthwhile.

It’s terrifying. I got over my fears of the cars quicker than I thought, but I have a lingering uneasiness about the road itself, much like after that wreck back in January. Maybe it’s because I’m riding more at night. I’ve found that unless I want to fork over the cash for a light the size of a basketball, night riding is in part a matter of memorization, and there are a few types of roads that are especially frightening: the ones that I know suck and have potholes everywhere (e.g., Hammond between Peachtree-Dunwoody and the Dekalb border), the dark ones that I don’t know super well, and the clean roads that the city paved over this month. Sandy Springs recently repaved Glenridge between Roswell Road and the Cingular building (or AT&T building, I guess), and even though there aren’t any more surprise pieces of missing road (I’m pretty sure they make machines to pave roads that you can run behind the machines that tear up roads, but no one ever uses them. To be fair, though, the whole process was super quick for an Atlanta road project. They even had a sign about halfway through the washboardy part that appeared to depict someone on a Vespa riding over a zigzag, which I thought was kind of funny), it’s still an inky mystery to me when I ride it. The only bad spots I’ve found so far are a couple of blotches of extra asphalt west of that one road with the stop light. They’re not anything huge, but they’re kind of annoying, and I’d prefer to dodge them.

I’ve also noticed myself taking turns a little slower than I could. I can’t remember the last time I lost traction due to gravel or sand or any of the other stuff I look out for, but I guess some lessons stick with you. Maybe that’s good?

During the daytime a couple of weeks ago I was instructed by a police officer to “get out of the road.” I didn’t, since I was about 100 feet from the MARTA station and he was going the other way, but it upset me enough that I sent an email to my city officials and that guy who writes the “View from the cop” column in the AJC. The mayor assures me that it was a misunderstanding and that Sandy Springs supports bicycles as part of the solution to the ever increasing problem of traffic congestion, and Lt. Rose said he’d say something about bicycles and mentioned that Peachtree Dunwoody is kind of busy. The police officers doing traffic control in the evenings haven’t given me any dirty looks as far as I’ve noticed, so maybe I didn’t piss anyone off too much.

It’s cold. The weather has been kind of erratic lately, but it’s dropped back below freezing this week, so I wandered into my favorite bike shop today to see what I could do. My face is the only part left that’s not covered, so I figured I’d try to cover that up and then figure out what else needs work. There was an older dude at the shop (the owner? I can’t remember seeing him before) who had all kinds of suggestions for hats and jerseys and shoe coverings and chemical warmers, and he convinced me to buy a balaclava before biking off to lunch. That’s such a weird word. I always think it says “baklava,” which would be delicious but probably not keep me warm. Merriam Webster says it comes from the Crimean war, so I guess I can thank the British for not picking a better word. I haven’t worn it yet (it warmed up a good bit this evening), but tomorrow morning doesn’t look too promising, so I’ll probably try then to see if I can wear the thing without fogging up my glasses or making anything think I’m about to rob a bank.

Well, I guess that’s it. I don’t have a lot to say about the denouement. Stepan Trofimovich set himself up as the swine in which to cast out the titular demons, but I don’t feel like his death from generic Victorian disease really had any meaning. Like Chris, I don’t understand what his character meant or why it took such a major role in parts of the book while being so uninvolved with the central plot.

The conspiracy completely fell apart, and I guess that’s the message: the weakness of man and the inevitability of failure in such revolutionary endeavors. I think tomorrow I’ll start that food book that Heather recommended.

I’d like to finish this book tonight, but such goals have in the past fallen short of expectation, so I figured I’d share some thoughts now. Also, this way I get to use “penultimate.”

I’m probably behind most of the group at this point, so I’m going to go ahead and talk in particulars instead of generalities. So, if you don’t want to know what’s happened, you know, here there be spoylers.

I’m at the start of the penultimate chapter. There have been several murders recently, but Shatov’s is the one that really matters; that was the one that was to bring the fivesome together. A couple of minor details bothered me through the otherwise engaging sequence of that murder. First, the fivesome itself. I don’t know if that number has some historical or numerological significance—Internet says that five represents grace and redemption in the Bible, most notably in Exodus—but it’s not the number itself that bothers me; I have a hard time keeping track of who exactly compose the five. The annoying part is that I don’t think the actual five even matter; every character in this book, outside of brief bursts of passion, lacks dimension, and most of the characters that have been attending the revolutionary meetings might as well all be the same. Inclusion or exclusion in this inner circle would only serve to create symbols of loyalty or favor for a particular sort of thinking or whatever rather than reveal any more about Pyotr Stepanovich. In fact, I think that the Shigalyov’s rejection of the murder was meant to be a message along these lines: he advocated idealism taken to a bloody extreme yet would not condone the killing of someone that wouldn’t survive his revolution—a Slavophil and, though Shatov was supposed to be a student, someone seemingly not extremely bright—perhaps because the overt reason for the killing was the survival of the group rather than the betterment of society. The fivesome hasn’t really done anything for society other than print some pamphlets, and all of the revolutionary talk they’ve had had been a sea of nonsense and empty words, the satire of the revolutionary groups.

I guess one of the things of that bothered me initially is that synopses say that this book is satire, and from that I expected the book to be funny. I won’t try to discuss the nature of humor or whether it really was funny in 19th century Russia, but the bulk of the book is more of a morality play than a joke. It’s satire in that it creates caricatures of the Russians, both the aristocracy and the revolutionaries, and especially their overlap, and Dostoevsky’s opinions and lessons are presented by emphasizing absurdities. The annoying part of this technique is that the chief absurdity of the aristocracy is that they’re really boring, and, particularly since the narrator is himself part of the idle rich, it’s difficult to identify with the writing, making it very boring to read.

Anyhow, the best I can tell is that the fivesome is (or was) Lyamshin, Liputin, Tolkachenko, Virginsky and Shigalyov. Pyotr Stepanovich doesn’t count, as far as I can tell, since he’s the head of this bizarre organism, and I think I one point Erkel was explicitly excluded from the fivesome, though now he appears to be the new head. Other than Shigalyov, the five characters are basically interchangeable, and I find it kind of weird that I have so little to say about any of them yet managed to spell all of their names correctly without looking them up.

The second thing that bothered me was that the narrator keeps referring to the group as “our people.” This creates an annoying break in the narrative in that it reminds me that the narrator, who isn’t involved in the revolutionary groups at all and has been absent for the last couple of chapters, is a character in this story however impossibly; and the emphasis on “our” tries to pull me in along with him. It’s probably the second effect that Dostoevsky was aiming for—your crazy thinking will be your doom and all that—but it’s a fairly unsubtle way to drive in his point, and it just exacerbates the narrator problem.

On the bright side, even though the narrator manages to wedge himself in to even the scenes where he’s absent, it’s been pretty interesting the last few chapters, and it’s almost over.