Been busy

Sorry 'bout that.

SCOTUS forces gay marriage on a country

I can't say anything better than Ace.

Between the SCOTUS re-writing Obamacare at it's whim, and now this, I can safely say that this country is fucked.

Sorry, kids.  You're screwed.  You're going to be raised in a socialist shithole compared to what I was raised in.  And it's only going to get worse.

And the gay mafia gets its wish.

A country that won't defend itself.

This is the end result of Leftist ideology.  In the country formerly known as "Great" Britain, the people in charge of protecting young girls can't even be bothered to interview the victims of muslim gang rape.

I mean, it was only uncovered last year,  what's the rush, right?  Don't want to be seen as racist, after all!  Pip pip, old boy!

If my daughter, or my friend's daughter, or my neighbor's daughter had been assaulted and raped like those girls in Rotherham were, and the police were more concerned about being nice to muslim rapists than bringing them to justice, I can guarantee that those muslim rapists would just...  disappear.

Nobody would ever see them again.  And they would never rape another girl again.  But then, there are still places in America where we haven't been corrupted by Liberalism yet.  We still defend ourselves.

Here's something not politics related

Unless you prefer auto transmissions, then DIE YOU COMMIE SCUM!

Rule of Law, RIP. It had a good run

The Supreme Clown Court of the United States of America has ruled that words no longer mean what they mean, and the law means what Obama wants it to mean, not what it actually says.

This country is over, folks.  Time to admit it.  It's all over but the shooting.

The ruling, as well as the previous Obamacare ruling that says a Penalty isn't a Penalty, it's a Tax, will do down with the Dred Scott decision as the worst rulings in SCOTUS history.

Cigar Review, Romeo y Julieta 1875 Torpedo

So, along with the Ave Maria that Anthony from CigarsCity.com sent me, there was also two Romeo y Julieta 1875 torpedoes for me to sample.  I let them sit in the humidor for a good long time, and I pulled out out last night to give it a try.

I didn't see the RyJ 1875 torpedoes on the website, but I did find the robustos.  It's a great blend no matter what size you smoke.

Fresh out of the wrapper, you get an aroma of tobacco and cedar.  The wrapper was cracked in the middle, but I'm fairly certain that's due to humidity fluctuations in my humidor.  The cigar seems to be well built.

I snipped off the end and the draw was good.  First light, and you get cedar, tobacco and hints of toast.  It's a medium bodied cigar, but it still holds its own with my single-malt scotch that I'm enjoying.  The flavor profile didn't change much as I smoked it, although it did get sweeter about halfway through the cigar.  The cedar faded a bit, and you get some cream and spice picking their heads up, but nothing dramatic.  Even when the nub was burning my fingers, you still got great flavor that wasn't too strong.

The ash held up as I smoked it, and I eventually knocked off two inches of ash that was still firm.  Great construction on this stick.  I never had any ash fall on me, even after letting it get to two inches.    Rolling the ash off the end of the cigar, you would get a firm barrel left in the ashtray.  It never disintegrated into loose ash.  The cigar burned even all the way down, no canoeing or soft spots.

The cigar remained medium bodied from start to finish, never beating up your palate.  As I said, it help up to my scotch, but it would go great with just bout any beer as well.

So, that's the technical stuff.  Here's the non-technical review.

This is a cigar that would pair well with anything you wanted to drink.  It's a middle-of-the-road cigar.  It's not going to jump up and scream "TASTE ME, YOU BASTARD!" but it's not going to leave you wanting more either.  It's a very good cigar.  But....

It's so middle-of-the-road that I have a hard time pointing to just what I like about it.  And I do like it, make no mistake.  I enjoyed it immensely, and I'm going to enjoy the second one that I have in my humidor.  But it's not memorable, not like the Ave Maria was.

This is the cigar that you get so that you can share with your buddies when they come over.  It's a good cigar, but you're not going to want to hoard them all.  And at $4 a stick, it's not going to bust your bank.  Would I pick it up at a cigar shop?  Depends on the price.  If it's listed as an $8 stick in the shop, then no.  But at the CigarsCity price?  Yep.  All day long.

Of course it gets worse

This pathetic clown show that Obama is running would fuck up a wet dream if it could.  Data breach numbers soar to 18 million.

I bet my SF86 is in that collection.

And since the most corrupt administration ever is in control, there's not a single person that's going to go to jail over this crap.

They would feel ashamed if they had any shame at all

How a 16 year old kid tricked the NYT and other "news" outlets into thinking Dylann Roof was a "Brony".

I'd tell that kid he's way too smart to go into journalism.

Holy. Crap!

Hummanahummanahummana....

The class-action lawsuit challenged various articles in Puerto Rico’s gun law, which the court declared unconstitutional. Because of the ruling, Barreras said, Puerto Ricans may now carry openly or concealed without a permit, and they do not need to obtain a permit before purchasing a firearm.

Emphasis mine.  This is huge, folks.  Puerto Rico now has better gun laws than the People's Demokratik Republik of Kalifornia.  When I lived there, you couldn't even sniff a gun permit unless you had another permit that allowed you to do so.

The criminals there must be shitting themselves silly at the thought of their victims being able to fight back.

I have done 24 of these 25 things

And the only reason it's not all 25 is because we didn't have snakes in rivers to throw rocks at.

I would add in:

26.  Jumping from a cliff into a lake or pond.
27.  Sprinting through a field while a bull tried to catch you and stomp a mud-hole in your ass.
28.  Learning how to pour a perfect cup of beer at age 5.
29.  Bareback horse riding.  No bridle either.

I've said it before

But sometimes it bears repeating - if I end up being just half the man my father is, I'll count my life well lived.

Happy Father's Day, Dad.

OK, the cider

I've tried two batches of cider here in LA, and neither of them came out as drinkable.

I used the same juice for both of them - unfiltered Honeycrisp Apple.  It was pasteurized, but unless you go to the orchard and get it straight off the press, you're going to get pasteurized juice.  Even when we pressed our own pears, we still had to heat it up to 140 degrees to kill any microbes that might try to take over.

Everything gets sanitized.  I use a phosphoric acid based sanitizer, and anything that touches the juice gets cleaned.

So - I filled two three-gallon carboys full of the juice.  I used two different strains of yeast - carboy one was White Labs English Cider yeast, and carboy two was a Nottingham Ale yeast.  The English Cider yeast tends to eat more sugar than the Nottingham Ale, so you get two distinct flavors out of the batches.  When I made the pear cider we used the Nottingham Ale yeast and it came out so good that I had people lined up to buy my entire 5 gallon batch.  And it was so good that I told them "Nope, I'm keeping this stuff".

I put the carboy into a bucket.  Depending on the amount of pectin in the juice, you can get some quite impressive blow-offs from the gas lock, and putting the carboy into a five gallon bucket helps contain any mess that might come out.  It also helps reduce the amount of light that reaches the brew while it's fermenting.  So I put the carboy into a bucket, throw a towel around the top to keep light out, and let 'er buck.  Specific Gravity at the start was 1.050, so a little high on the beer scale but definitely within the range you want.

Here's the thing.  It smelled awesome while it was fermenting.  But yeast is very temperature sensitive.  Too hot or cold and you get some "off" flavors.  And boy howdy did I get some off flavors.  The end result was a cross between hard apple cider and vinegar, and even the small sample I tried left me with an upset stomach due to it's harshness.  SG was an even 1.000, which puts the Alcohol By Volume at 6.5%.  It was just un-drinkable.  Too harsh, flavors were horrible, and it upset the stomach.

The only real variable I could not control was the temperature.  It's the same with our meads and wines.  It's too hot in this house, and the temperature changes too much.  There's no real cool place for me to brew and age the stuff.  The gas locks never got compromised, the brew did want it was supposed to do, the juice I used was so rich and sweet that I wanted to drink it rather than ferment it, and the yeast was alive and well when I dumped it in.  It still turned out crap, just like about half the meads we've made.  They've either been too sweet (yeast didn't eat all the sugar), too harsh (off flavors and unpleasant taste from yeast that's too hot), or there's been too many temperature changes throughout the day and the yeast has put out an unpalatable mix of esters that make you gag.

Once I get to a house in a place without this jacked-up climate, or that has a basement where the temperature remains more constant, I think I'll start having success again.  But for now, I'm done trying to brew in LA.