Tybee Tiki

Leah and Amy got me this cool little guy on a recent trip to Tybee Island. They rock!



It has a little in common with an Orchids of Hawaii R-3 but it's not a direct copy of anything else out there that I know of.



It does come with directions to concoct a Deep Atlantic. That may be the cause of him holding in his tummy. I haven't tried it yet but I'll share it with you.

Deep Atlantic

1.5 oz. Vodka
1.5 oz. Rum
1 oz. Blue Curacao

Fill a long glass with crushed ice,
stir all ingredients and fill with
1 tbsp. of Sprite.

I'll post a comment when I try one. Let me know if you beat me to it.

Great British Tikis!

Dave and Danielle made a great find at a garage sale this weekend. Their amazing bargaining powers netted me a pair of tiki mugs from The Patio at the Sheraton Skyline near Heathrow.



The mugs are stamped "DAGA (c) HAWAII" on the bottom. I believe it's a Stephen Crane Associates design originally for the Kon Tiki at the Sheraton in Hawaii. Similar mugs were made by Daga Restaurant Ware Limited for other Sheraton locations that had Kon Tiki restaurants in them. I found a reference to a Kon Tiki at the Skyline Sheraton in an article from Nude Magazine. I guess eventually this turned in to "The Patio" and then perhaps maybe the "The Patio Caribe" which I can find more recent references to. However now it looks like the last of it may be just be part of the "Sky Garden and Pool Area" and all of the "tiki stuff" is gone. My best guess is that these might be from the 80's as I'm not really sure when the name changed. The crazing of the glaze on the mugs seems to indicate they have a few years on them. I'll update this post if I ever figure out any more details.

Thanks Dave and Danielle!

The Power of Two

Today was brought to you by the number two (Note that it's June 2nd too.)




This week I had a cheeseburger for lunch at Cheeseburger In Paradise. It sucked. So today I had my 2nd cheesebuger of the week at Ted's Montana Grill. I had the Vermejo burger and it was awesome. This should satisfy my "good burger" craving for at least a couple of months.

After lunch we went by Trader Joe's where among other things I picked up some Charles Shaw 2005 Shiraz. It's surprisingly drinkable for two bucks (OK... $2.50.) Sure, there are better, but I've paid more for worse. I'd probably even buy it again. Then to top it off the cashiers found two of the Tiki Bags that now seem to be harder to find in the stores.

Today's mail produced a blue bubble-wrap envelope from Robert Drasnin. Inside the envelope was a brand new CD release of Drasnin's called Voodoo II (to follow up his 1959 exotica recording of Voodoo.) Back in January I got an email from the Tiki Events Mailing List announcing that Drasnin was going to record a new album this February in Los Angles but was funding the recording out of his own pocket. For a modest up-front contribution you could help him fund the recording and get an autographed copy of the CD when it came out. Well it's here now and will be getting a lot of grantbob airtime soon.

You too can get Voodoo II at Amazon and probably somewhere else. The official Robert Drasnin website appears to be broken. Maybe it will be back some day. Until then there's a decent little bio from the first Voodoo re-release on CD from Dionysus here: Bio

Thank you Two.

The New Thing!

The new Thing came with our DVD's today.

You'll have to add your own tape and eyes though (we just happen to have all that type of stuff handy.)

Offer from Newegg ends tomorrow: RiDATA 4.7GB 8X DVD-R 50 Pack with FREE Newegg CD/DVD Wallet with "Ridata" Logo

Crawfish

Today was Tom's Annual (or at least it's becoming that way) Crawfish Boil.


I'm not a fan of lobster but I like these little things. It's probably because of the heat induced by all the good spicy things in crab boil (Zatarain's!.)

Crayfish, Crawfish, Crawdads... it's all the same.

I made and brought an edamame salad that kind of went like this:

1 16 oz. bag of frozen shelled edamame
1 medium-large can of shoepeg corn (drained)
1/2 red onion (chopped)
1 clove of garlic (minced)
1/3 cup olive oil
2 tablespoons white balsamic vinegar
juice of one lemon
2 teaspoons "greek spice blend" (or some oregano would probably work)
8 oz. of feta cheese (crumbled)
salt & pepper

Cook edamame as per package directions. Cool under cold water and then drain. Mix with corn and onions. Combine oil, vinegar, lemon juice, spice blend and garlic. Pour over edamame mixture. Add crumbled feta. Salt & Pepper to taste. Let mixture sit for at least an hour to let all the flavors meld.

Towel Day

Today is Towel Day: A Tribute to Douglas Adams. Adams is the one who brought us The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which many consider science fiction. Some however, find that it's not quite as fictitious as once thought :) .


(Photo by Bear.)

Sass those hoopy froods.


For more info on Towel Day check out: http://www.towelday.kojv.net/

Silica Gel

We're saving all the silica gel we find around the office and putting it in a jar.



So far we almost have enough to cover the bottom of the jar. Some of it is in little clear plastic beads. Some of it looks more like cat litter. According to this Wikipedia entry the blue ones are dry and the pink ones are wet. I guess the clear one's don't have the color-indicator stuff added. I might have to separate some of the different kinds out once we get some more and do some experiments.

I always used to wonder what would happen if you ate it (since all the little packets advise you not to.) I found an article once from an EMT that said it was about like eating sand. However after reading the above entry and the things they actually do to it, I think I'd try sand first.

This is Pie

We went to see my grandmother this weekend. She made me a chocolate pie.



People kill for these pies.



This was my pie.

I shared... a little.

I love Grandmother. :)

And from Weebl & Bob: Pie!

I'm a bad person...

Oddly enough we were having a short discussion at lunch the other day about how red light cameras work.



This came in today's mail and answers all the questions. This happened weekend before last on the way home from getting a haircut. By the time I realized I was screwing up, it was too late. I was wondering at the time how tight the tolerances were. They're pretty tight. Oh well. I think I should have at least got a discount for using my turn indicators.

Lilburn's online payment system works pretty well.

Nothing more to say on this one. :(

Inside the Carillon

It was cool and wet out this morning. but I still decided to head out to Stone Mountain to hear Ms. Mabel play the carillon at noon.

(this picture is from the top of the mountain taken a few months ago)

For those of you not familiar with the Stone Mountain Carillon, the instrument was built by Schulmerich Carillons in Sellersville, PA for the Coca-Cola Pavilion 1964 World's Fair in New York. At 610 bells it was the largest instrument of its kind. After the fair Coca-Cola moved the instrument to Georgia's Stone Mountain Park. By this time 610 bells wasn't the largest any more so a few more ranks were added during the move putting it at 732 bells.After Ms. Mabel played I dropped by the console to say hello and give her dog Max a few scratches. It turns out that Max wasn't here today because we had guests. The guests were from Schulmerich. One from HQ up in PA and the other is the "local" field engineer who currently resides down in Florida. They were here for a checkup to assess how the instrument is doing and plan any corrective actions. I was in for a treat as the field engineer and his son took me down to the vault underneath the console to see how it all worked.



The Carillon resides in 9 equipment cabinets in a climate-control room underneath the console. The original cabinets were mounted to the wall. The current arrangement seems to give them more space and make it easier to work on the instrument.

This is the digital control panel. It controls the hourly chimes and the daily "recorded" performances for the carillon when Ms. Mabel isn't playing live. There is a recorder up on top of the console that accepts a memory card of sorts where performances can be recorded. They can then be loaded in and programed for playback down here.


Here is rack #5 all opened up. These are the bells for the harp, celesta and quadra bell sounds. The lower notes (longer bars) are at the top and they get higher (shorter bars) as they go down.

The bell's bars have 3 solenoid controlled strikers under each one. I presume that's how they get three different bell sounds out of the same bar in this unit. Each bar has an electromagnetic pickup along the back (similar to guitar pickups underneath the strings.) Each pickup then runs to a preamp/mixer.



All the various preamps run to a master mixer where each one of the sets of sounds can be finely controlled to mix with the others when played together.



Finally the sound goes through power amplifiers (I counted at least 6 of them) and out to the tower by the lake.

Mabel Sansing Sharp at the Console

It was quite a treat to be able to be in there while they had things opened up. It's not like the equipment cabinets had doors or easy access to what's inside. I just lucked out on visiting on the right day. One of these days I plan to put up a web page or two detailing the history of this instrument. It deserves a little more than the 3 lines of text the park devotes to it on their web site.

Further Reading:

• Schulmerich Carillons at the fair from the site nywf64.com
• Coca-Cola Pavilion at the fair from the site nywf64.com
• Stone Mountain Park's Carillon Info Page

Tiki Bags & Ketchup

I finally got a chance to drop by one of our new Trader Joe's we have here in Atlanta. It's not quite a cool as the one I remember from San Francisco in the late 90's but I'm still glad we got them. I picked up some snacky things for work and some cool soap for home and got to put it all in a nifty Tiki Grocery bag. I had read about them on the Tikievents mailing list a month or so ago and was glad to find they had them here in GA (and still had some left.) I may have to go back and get more.

On a totally unrelated note (but in the same picture!) I've done a lot of reading about ketchup in the past few days. It started from a trip to Ketchup World from another blog somewhere (A Hunger Artist I think.) It's amazing how many different ketchups and ketchup-related condiments are out there. It got me to wondering about the history of ketchup. Evidently it got started from some sort of soy and fish sauce and eventually had mushrooms, walnuts, and all sort of other spices and flavorings added to it. Later on tomato ketchup became the standard for some reason. I guess that's good because I don't really want fish sauce on my hot dogs. However I did decide it might be cool to try and make some soon and found a few recipes (that don't start with 24lbs of tomatoes and a ton of mason jars.) Let me know if you try one before I do:

• Homemade Ketchup at Epicurious
• Two Recipes from Classic Culinary Arts