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Browsing Tags Heat

Review: Gordon Biersch SommerBrau

July 19, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

You are sick of the heat. You are sick of feeling like you’ve been dipped in a tub of sweat and grime after 10 minutes of being outdoors. You are sick of everything that makes you warm. Clothes. Fire. Human touch.

You are officially broken up with Summer.

In an attempt to cool down, you’ve tried everything you remember from your childhood. You’ve flipped your sweat-soaked pillow more times than you can remember. You’ve clumsily jumped through your sprinkler while your neighbors watched, concerned, from their windows. You’ve put bags of peas on your forehead as you lay on the cold, tile floor in the basement.

And yet, you’re still too hot.

You try to think cool thoughts. Penguins, the arctic, the opening scenes from the 1993 X-Files episode, Ice. Mind over matter and all that. Think cold and you’ll be cold, right? You sit next to the AC vent, letting the forced air push the hair from your face and evaporate the sweat that has pooled in your eyebrows.

You waft your shirt over your stomach, hoping that the improved airflow will lower your internal temperature. You stare at the digital thermometer, questioning its accuracy. Your mind wanders to Spring, Fall, Winter; any time when the world isn’t trying to burn you to death.

You fill a large glass with water and add four blocky ice cubes until the contents almost overflows. You feel the relief penetrating your throat and chest as you take your first gulp. Before you realize, you’ve finished the glass of water. That was good. But you want more.

You pour another glass. Cranberry juice cocktail. The sweet and tangy concoction brings a smile to your lips, but your body cries for even more quench. Another glass. Chocolate milk. Bad idea. Refill. Unsweetened lemon-laced iced tea. Getting there, but still missing something.

The hiss as the cap comes off alone makes you feel cooler. The yellow glow of the beer in the glass is worth at least a degree or two. You take a sip. Hop bitterness, a hint of fruit. Cleverly balanced doughy malts.

Relief.

9 out of 10.

This beer never grew up and moved out. He still lives at home with his glasses.

How to read 1000 pages in two days

July 2, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

Having trouble finding time in your busy schedule to read all of those awesome books on your “awesome books to read” list?

Follow my simple guide, and you’ll be plowing through Fifty Shades of Grey and the Twilight Saga is record time!

How to read 1000 pages in two days:

Things you’ll need:
-A book (or books)
-Working eyeballs
-Light
-Beer (anything cold)

Step 1: Have a massive, sudden storm demolish the power grid/infrastructure near your home

Something like this should do:

Tis’ but a scratch.

Step 2: Read, because you have nothing else to do

It is best to distract yourself from the heat and lack of any creature comforts by reading something riveting that takes place somewhere cold. I chose A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin. The Frostfangs and The Wall didn’t sound so bad when I was roasting myself in our void of AC.

Step 3: Continue to read until you fall asleep

While you’re digging through drawers looking for your LED book light in the waning daylight, find some way to keep your beer cold. I recommend stealing some ice from your neighbors, filling a martini shaker, and shoving your beer in there as a make shift wine-bucket.

Good luck to everyone in the DC Metro Area still without power. May your batteries never die and your candles burn long.

Land Rovers make good pole support, apparently.

Review: Troegs Sunshine Pils

June 27, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

He wore a wide-brimmed hat to keep his fair skin out of direct light. Long sleeves covered his existing, blistering burns, and he sweat like a mobster taking a polygraph. His thick white clothes were his only armor against the rays that bombarded plant, stone, and man.

His garden was wilted. The plants struggled to grow with what little water they were provided, and lost most of it to the heat of the day. The shade of his wooden shed gave them some respite, but the sun moved quickly and consistently. He lost a whole row of beets to a wildfire a few weeks earlier. He sat and watched as their above ground leaves burst into flames, spontaneously combusting under the midday sun. All that was left were blackened husks. The fruit below the earth dry and hard, unfit for human consumption.

But still he farmed, or farmed as best he could. The animals had perished long ago, and the few cacti and longrasses that could survive the summers make for bland, unsatisfying meals. He dug his rows at night, when the temperature dropped to a tolerable one hundred and three degrees. This was the only time the ground was breakable; he’d ruined 3 good shovel trying to crack the crust of baked clay that covered his land during the daylight hours.

An eye dropper was his watering can. Each drop he placed was precious, so he made sure each plant got only what it needed to not die. The arid soil gulped each drop greedily, and he prayed that it would seep low enough to nourish the parched roots. The plants survived through his meticulous care, but they did not thrive.

One night while digging a row for the tomatillo seeds he had found in his basement, his shovel struck something hard. The reverberations rushed to his shoulders, causing him to drop the shovel and grab his right arm in pain. As he slumped to the ground, he could see the edge of what he had struck. Something big. Something metal.

The next night, he ignored his rows and began to dig up the newly found object. It could be anything from what he could see of it; an old car, a chest, a washing machine, or even part of some left over military ordnance. He worked unrelentingly to unearth whatever it was; this find was the first thing to break his routine in a number of years.

It took a week of nightly digging, taking a few hours each night to drop water on his existing plants, to dig a hole big enough to get a true sense of the thing. It was rectangular and heavy, roughly the height of a man, with the outline of what appeared to be two hinged doors, caked with dirt. He dared not open it. He feared its power.

The thing became an object of worship and wonder; a monolith that he admired as much as he feared. The world had been destroyed by the evils of men and machines, and it was entirely possible this massive metal block was a weapon that would put a quick end to him and his little patch of struggling life. But something inside of him burned to know its secrets, burned like the sun in the middle of the day, burned like the nuclear clouds that drifted across the planet.

The fire inside overwhelmed him one evening. He found himself standing in front of his god, shovel stuck in the crack between the doors, ready to pry them open and meet his maker. He stood at the ready for hours. Finally, with a breath of despair, he put his weight against the shovel. The doors swung open easily. He was hit by something he hadn’t felt since he was a just a boy.

Cold.

Smoke accompanied the drop in temperature, and he stood for a minute shocked at the relief he felt. Large bricks of smoking, translucent material sat in the bottom of the opening behind the doors, radiating a refreshing coolness. In the bright moonlight he strained to see what else was inside. It was a cavernous thing, this cold metal box, but the only thing that sat on a shelf in the middle were 6 brown bottles, all near freezing and almost painful to the touch.

He knew bottles from his childhood. He removed one and carefully used the shovel to remove its cap. A small hiss let him know its seal had stayed intact. He pressed it to his lips.

The rest he poured onto his plants.

9 out of 10.

It is incredibly difficult to take a picture of direct sunlight.

It’s Too Hot

June 22, 2011 · by Oliver Gray

6 months ago, I was told it might snow. Now I hear it’s too hot.

In case your skin and sweat glands aren’t working properly, the temperature outside is steadily rising. If I take the average of the temperatures I’ve heard on the radio, seen on the TV, and read on the internet, it is roughly 132 degrees Fahrenheit today.

It is undecided whether this weather is a freak heat wave, the aftermath of a solar flare, some unproven side effect of global warming, or just a normal Summer day. Records are being broken, thermometers are rapidly exploding into showers of mercury, and human spontaneous combustion is imminent. You should probably wear shorts.

I am sympathetic to those who continually note how hot it has gotten, seeing that it never really gets hot around here. It is very hard to acclimatize to extreme heat when you’ve never been so hot in your entire life. Some advice for the ill-prepared: buy one of those fans with a misting bottle attached to it, they are awesome.

Make sure to complain about the heat, even when it is very obvious that others around you are painfully aware of said heat. Ask anyone you see, who you know was recently outside, if it was “hot enough for them”; this kind of humor is classic and timeless, and may help distract people from the heat. Complain that you’re too hot in your clothes, and comically suggest that your boss allow office nakedness in response to the heat. Awkwardly glance at an attractive coworker as you make this suggestion.

Do your best to avoid moving. Remind those you see that you got excessively sweaty just walking the 30 feet from your car to the office door. Point to the sweat marks near your armpits as proof. Give people plenty of warning that they too might suffer a fate worse than sweat if they brave the scolding climate.

Always remember that heat is dangerous, so avoid going outside if at all possible. Tell your friends that you’ll wait for it to “cool off” before you leave the house. Never be satisfied that it has “cooled off” enough; you don’t want to risk dehydration and hyperthermia just to be social.

If you must go outside, take proper precaution. Spray yourself with half a gallon of perfume/cologne to mask the BO that will inevitably creep up after a long sweat session. Grab either side of your shirt and wave it back and forth to fan refreshing air across your overheating gut. Whenever you can, hike up your pants to cool off your legs. Don’t worry about your disgusting, sweaty leg hair or the alabaster sheen of your shins and thighs; no one will judge you since it is so hot outside.

Make sure you drink plenty of fluids. Beer is a great choice as it contains water, electrolytes, and alcohol. If you feel woozy, you’re probably just drunk (and definitely not experiencing the onset of heat exhaustion). If you have to perform any labor, make sure it is very intense to avoid prolonged heat exposure; better to frantically squeeze all of the work into an exhausting 15 minutes than stretch it across 4 hours. Less is more…or more is less…I ’m not sure; my brain is fried from the heat.

If you notice the heat, the best thing you can do is tell others about it, as they may have lived in Antarctica their entire lives, and may not recognize this phenomenon as “heat”. Some people may have teleported to work, and will appreciate you telling them the weather, as they didn’t have to go outside during their instantaneous commute.

If others in your social networks claim they have it worse, tell them that they are closing schools due to the heat. If the kids are in danger from the heat, it’s clearly too hot. You can also remind them how hot the Metro gets (and sucks!), and how slow people drive when their tires are literally melting onto the roadway. Double points if you point out how humid it is and how that humidity clearly makes our heat worse than “dry heat”.

(The Desert Shadow Dogs come out when it gets this hot. They scour the barren, burned landscape searching for collapsed, dehydration/alcohol poisoning victims. You have been warned. )

Be sure to appreciate how hot it is, because before you know it, you’ll be complaining about how cold it is. Hell, it might even get cold enough to snow this winter.