bryan wann :: binary fury

Can’t sleep, clowns will eat me. Comedy sketch with lulz. “Do you speak English? No, I don’t, sorry.” I could’ve sworn I linked to this before, but can’t find it.

Tonight I’m trying to master the perfect pitcher of iced tea. Perfect to me is something unsweetened, snappy and refreshing like what I can get at any local Tex-mex place at lunch. It’s not as easy as Lipton would have me believe. I bought some Lipton tea bags the other day, the first pitcher was awful — extremely bitter. The directions called for 2 quarts of boiling water, 2 family-sized tea bags, seep for 5 minutes then chill.

Not really a fan of tea bags nowadays I bought some Lipton loose tea to try. Followed some internet directions, 1.5 liters of boiling water, seeped for 3 hours and chilled. It was cloudy and bitter. I cheated and added some lemon juice; still cloudy and knocked out a bit of the bitterness. Still unacceptable.

Everyone on the internet has their own opinions on what constitutes the perfect tea. Some call for seeping for hours, even overnight; seep for a few minutes, let it come to room temperature; use cold water and set the jug out in the sun for 4-5 hours. I really want to believe restaurants aren’t adding sugar or simple syrup to their allegedly unsweetened tea. If anything, I have plenty of tea and water to keep trying until I figure it out.

At the moment I’ve got two pitchers in the making. One was made with 1.5 liters of boiling water (can we please do away with ‘cups’ and ‘quarts’ and stick with mililiters?), 2 tablespoons of loose tea, seeped 10 minutes, now cooling to room temperature on its own. The other jug was one family-sized (6 gram) of not-for-cold-water tea, and 4 cups of cold water. Interestingly, I had to weigh down the teabag with a spatula because it floated on the cold water. So far after an hour, the boiled water tea is a very dark red and the cold water tea barely has any color at all.

In other news, I discovered some outfit called the “Ultra Marathon Cycling Association” holds a “Austin 200k” once a year in January. Allegedly it’s as tough as it gets around here. The route this year started in Bee Caves, looped around Mansfield Dam, down to Southwest Austin over Lost Creek (some extremely steep climbs), out Fitzhugh Road to Johnson City — and back. This guy claims the route is 127 miles long with 10,000 feet of elevation gain. I drove part of Fitzhugh Road to Dripping Springs today, it’s a shoulderless two-lane country road with lots of rolling hills. That, along with the Lost Creek, Loop 360, and Mansfield Dam portions, I can certainly believe it involves 10,000 feet of climbing.

I never went to sleep last night. Drinking copious amounts of tea kept me wired all night long. This morning at 5:00 I drove downtown to wander around. The Republic of Texas bikers must’ve had one hell of a party, 6th street was covered in plates and cups and other trash. The street sweepers were out vacuuming it all up in huge swaths. I went to IHOP for breakfast, it’s been so long since I’ve had bacon and eggs. Pancakes too, for that matter.

It seems I have two winning solutions to iced tea. The teabag-in-cold water was a nice deep caramel color this morning and tasted nice. Apparently the trick is to let the stuff just sit for several hours. The slight bitterness of the hot brewed tea disappeared too. I’m not sure how I can improve upon these yet, these are certainly acceptable. They go nice on a warm day like today.

So far the winner is 1.5 liters of boiling water, 2 family-sized tea bags, seep for three minutes, then top off the pitcher with ice to chill it rapidly. It only has a hint of aftertaste, best batch so far!

I’ve drank too much during this process, I’m bouncing off the damn walls now.

I had this incredibly long, drawn out dream last night that my hometown was basically hit by LIT3 during a storm. I was up visiting, we drove back in to town and saw an old house engulfed in flames. We were wondering where the fire department was, went over the hill and saw several more houses engulfed in flames. Our house was intact, but we could see flames inside. I ran in and saw the breaker panel was on fire. Apparently the lightning storm had blown out people’s electric meters and panels, causing several of the fires (it’s a dream, ok?). The next morning the media had a helicopter fly over, showing it on television. There was a huge charred spot where the lightning hit. They said 14 people were killed, which in a small town is a lot. Weather radar picked it up too, as a bright red burst. Wild.

I’ve been reading Lee Iacocca’s new book, Where Have All the Leaders Gone?. His rants about the lack of good American leadership, politics, healthcare, are primo angry old man. He lights a fire under every topic and doesn’t let up, but also offers some reasonable suggestions on how to fix things. Unfortunately, they’re going to take balls to implement and I’m too cynical to see anyone use them unless we have another American revolution. The book could only be more awesome if he had a chapter titled “Get off my lawn!”

7 weeks without a single drop of soda!

Well, House Bill 1815 which clarifies it’s legal to transport a handgun in a vehicle for protection without a CHL (provided you’re legal and not a thug, and the gun is hidden), is on its way to Perry.

Senate Bill 534, which would have allowed CHL holders to transport and store handguns in their vehicles on employers’ property, wasn’t picked up by the House so it basically died today. Since the calendar has ran out, it’ll have to be re-introduced in the next lege session.