Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Ray's Bachelor Party




Had a lot of fun this weekend. I took Friday off and our entire group minus Bob drove up from LA to Coloma in the Gold Hills about an hour east of Sacramento. We went wine tasting when we got there. The area looks like a booming wine region, lot of new vineyards popping up. The Two places we went to were Gold Hills Winery and Venezio. We tasted a few varieties, Port, some Champange, Merlots, Barberas and a Sangiovese. I bought a bottle of Merlot and filled up my wineskin, we drank it all weekend.
After wine tasting we checked into our campground. This place had the most amenities I've ever seen. There were hot showers and since the water was electrically heated they never ran out of water. They also had a full kitchen with propane tanks. When we got there the tents were even set up already with mats in them. Right when we got there though a bunch of lawyers came and we had to move to another campsite, but the second one was just as loaded with amenities and had more privacy. Adam who brought all the food cooked up some awesome steaks which we ate with baked potatos. Man we would have starved without Adam there. Afterwards we built a huge fire then went to sleep.
The next day we got up early, froze our asses off and quickly ate breakfast. We had eggs, bacon and tortillas. Afterw aiting for the lawyers to get their crap together our group hopped on buses and drove about an hour to our embarkation point. We all put on vests and helmets and started rafting the Middle Fork of the American River. We were suppose to paddle the South Fork but they didn't open up the dams so we were bumped to the Middle Fork, which was actually for the better it had better class 4 rapids. We ended up rafting about 17 miles with an average grade of 23 degrees per mile. I'm glad we had a good guide, he made the trip seem easy, we would so have been killed if we tried to raft that river ourselves.
We got back to camp and ate hamburgers. I was so hungry I ate about 3 costco cheeseburgers. We also gathered a whole bunch of wood and made a huge fire. After everything was done Adam pulled out some cigars and we smoked them up with some port and wine.
Sunday we got up and drove back home. Here's some pictures, Bob had an awesome waterproof camera so eh goot some cool rafting pics.

Rafting Pics

>On 2005-09-30,21:10:00 lysette wrote:

>>that's so cool. which one are you in the picture above? 17 miles! that's crazy. is it hard?


>On 2005-10-03,12:44:23 Blaise wrote:

>>I'm the one in red. It was okay we had a guide who made it seem easy.

Thursday, September 15, 2005

gillette_fusion (5, count th




What am I doing here shaving like a goddamn animal with 3 blades. Its a good thing I shave like once a month cuase I bet thing thing cost like twice as much.

>On 2005-09-15,23:08:37 Blaise wrote:

>>http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930

palm civet and kopi luwak




I was watching the History Channel about coffee. There is this type of coffee called kopi luwak which comes from Indonesia and it goes for as much as 300 dollars per pound. Yet it isn't its ridiculous price which is most intriguing, its the processing method. The coffee beans are dug out of the droppings of this fairly ugly cat like create, the palm civet, or luwak. Thats right, this animal eats the coffee cherries and poops out the slightly fermented seeds for people to harvest and sell in Japan and the United States for 300 dollars a pound. Supposedly the discovery has its roots from coffee's labor intensive process. Why harvest coffee beans from the tree only to pick out the good cherries and go through the process of shelling them when you can just hunt around for droppings that this animal leaves. Not only did the palm civet flesh out the coffee cherries, leaving only the seed, it is also known as a picky eater so the seeds are only whats left of the best of the best fruits that it eats. But I guess it turns out you gotta pay a guy quite a bit to sort cat shit.
Kopi Luwak
Palm Civet

>On 2005-09-15,16:00:51 Blaise wrote:

>>Now that I think about it, with what starbucks charges they probably do make about 300 bucks per pound of coffee grinds.


>On 2005-09-16,11:40:09 Blaise wrote:

>>We have truely gone insane. This "animalcoffee" retailer sells a half kg of kapi luwak with some dried cat shit for $450 bucks.
http://www.animalcoffee.com/products/index.cfm/cat/gift-box/id/4/show/details/
Geniuses. I'd like to be bank loan officer for that pitch. "Ok here's our business model. We find some cat shit in the Sumatran jungle, put some folgers in a box and sell it for half a grand. Where do we sign?"

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Remembered


This month I also tried to float my annual car insurance on my credit card, but they would only accept cash or check! No cash back, sad.

Airlines




Wow Delta Airlines stock dropped 7 cents and that amounted to a 9% change, carazy. Look that the market cap, according to that the company is worth about half of one of those new Airbus double decker A380 jets. Maybe Delta and Northwest can chip in to buy one.

Friday, September 9, 2005

Surf




Mother of all tan lines. Damnit, this is going to take months to fade. I've got matching ones on my arms, I now have a permanent shirt and shorts on at all times.

Friday, September 2, 2005

Da Media




Wow Kanye West went on a crazy tirade about how the media is equating looters with black people. Aren't rappers/music producers part of this media machine we all speak of? I think there might be a correlation between designer jeans in music videos and designer jeans being looted.

On my ride to work there was a man being interviewed. He was cussing and blasting the federal government, sounded very rowdy, he sounded like he was about to demand some money from his hos, then the interview thanks him, the Mayor of New Orleans.

NPR


I've been stuck working in the basement all week and I had the radio tuned to National Public Radio, which was doing extensive coverage of Katrina, although of course every interview came down to the reporter yelling "WHERE IS YOUR HOMELAND SECURITY NOW!!" or "DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR PRESIDENT IS!!" Larry King on interviewing Jerry Lewis right now on CNN. Damn Jerry Lewis looks great, he must be like a hundred. Sinatra dead, Sammy dead, Jerry, fiestier than Larry.

Thursday, September 1, 2005

Katrina




"I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this — whether it be looting, or price gouging at the gasoline pump, or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud," Bush said. "And I've made that clear to our attorney general. The citizens ought to be working together." Tolerance, thats for hippies. Personally I'd like to hear that a truckload of food and water is coming my way from the president. I can care less about what the attorney general should be doing. Why not just leave it at "the citizens ought to be working together."