Wow… Friday already. this week was nuts. I’m on call much of the weekend, but I managed to hand a good chunk of Sunday off, though 4-7 I have to be on top of things. No major walkabout, it seems. I think I’ll do the Wolfsonian, the week after.

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It’s been over a year since the last episode of Skeletor and Gang was made. I’ve always been partial to #14… That’s a pretty good approximation of South Florida nightlife.

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I want to be with Mi Hala, holding hands, and sharing her space right now. Best, closest thing is to just join energy across boundless space and time… all hippy-like.

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Bro’s case yesterday was just a calendar call. he’s on one hour notice for a hearing that should take place sometime next week. Apparently Andy was there, smelling of beer and looking rough, bro was clean and in a tie.

We’ll see what that week brings. He hasn’t been terribly communicative lately.

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Looking at my hit logs, I found a few things.

threads swiping my bandwidth –

http://forums.anandtech.com – newt (talking about pink toes)

http://www.penny-arcade.com – palm pic of a pirate (talking about doom3)

best search phrase so far? – “the dwarf skill massacre of 1908”

top keywords, as always –

melons – 31% of my hits for August. (30% of July)
wench – 26% (12% of July)

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The new Batmobile in action

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Cat droppings yield chic coffee

Discovery shows unusual beans can be created in the guts of different civet species.

A food scientist has cracked the secrets of the world’s most expensive coffee, Kopi Luwak, whose beans pass through the intestinal tract of an Indonesian civet before being roasted and savored. But the elusive blend looks unlikely to be copied any time soon.

The beans, which cost over US$1,000 a kilogram, are eaten and passed by the Asian palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus), which is a musky, tree-climbing cat-like creature. The supply of Kopi Luwak has always been tiny, but political turmoil in Indonesia has strangled production even further: less than 230 kilograms of the coffee are now being made each year.

Massimo Marcone, a researcher at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, wondered whether it might be possible to reproduce the effect that the Indonesian civets have on the coffee. He searched the world for another place with both coffee plants and civets, and hit upon Ethiopia, where coffee itself was born.

“It was something I was just dreaming up,” he says. “Where else do we have coffee and the cat in a similar place?” In a forthcoming issue of Food Research International, Marcone describes how he brewed coffee from beans that he personally picked out of the feces of African civets (Civettictis civetta) and compared it with a mug of Kopi Luwak.

Marcone found that in both cases the civets’ digestive action broke down proteins in the beans into smaller molecules that added to the flavor and aroma of the coffee on roasting. Some proteins were leached out of the beans completely, making the resulting coffee less bitter.

Bragging rights

Kopi Luwak was not as easy to copy as Marcone had hoped: the guts of the Indonesian civets did a much more thorough job of breaking down the proteins than did the digestive systems of the African civets.

But Marcone also discovered that the slow passage through the bacteria and enzymes in the civet’s gut is similar to a method of fermenting coffee called the wet process. They even use the same agent: lactic acid bacteria.

He is sure that he could tweak the wet process to be a better approximation of the inside of a civet, perhaps by using the same strains of lactic acid bacteria. But he is not sure the simulation is worth it. “If we were able to develop it, you would lose the bragging rights that this is the rarest and most expensive coffee in the world,” he says.

And ultimately, it is those bragging rights that matter. Despite being described by some as “earthy, musty, syrupy, smooth and rich, with both jungle and chocolate undertones”, Marcone admits that Kopi Luwak is “different from, but not better than, other coffees”.

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The ad on TV just said “I’m a research scientist, so when I got arthritis, I did some research.”

So… what would a fisherman do?

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1 year ago – miniature oranges, orisinal games, tv in my head, first/last meme, newt on a windowsill, daler mehndi ,

2 years ago – Newt Wakies, Croc bite brings beer, scotto-man, overtired, funions

3 years ago – vcr tape, gaming, militate, warren, scientific independence for researchers, Frontier Psychiatrist, evil SUV

4 years ago – many folks join my Friendy-list (probably due to interests) , grover, graves museum