Good news from the Perambulator workshop! I've finally convinced my sibling, Mr Hoarder of All to allow us to borrow this sweet ride for our project. It needs a little work to get it running again but it will be plenty powerful enough and should save us a lot of money and time. The downside is that he'll want the cart back when we're done with it. Presumably looking the same way as when he lent it to us.

The bad news is where it's currently located. For those of you that don't know, my brother is a hoarder to the highest degree. Mostly cars and parts but he also has a lot of furniture and rusty old tools. The problem is that a lot of this crap is between the cart and the free world. In the pic to the left(click to zoom), of the side of his house, you can see the cart in the background. The exit gate is behind the camera. 1. Is a non-running '70 Mustang. 2. Is a running '71 Torino. 3. Is a questionable 70's pick-up and 4. is a trailer made from an old pickup bed. All running cars share the same battery. Between 2 and 3 are 8 derelict automatic transmissions. I've been meeting with professionals all week and plan to make a cart rescue attempt on Sat.. I will report any successes. Failure is not an option. Following this recovery I will be ramping up the work schedule for the Perambulator for those that would like to assist with it's creation. Wish me luck.

-Professor Fate, Search and Rescue

Navigational Equipment Secured

So I was tooling around this flea market in Johannesburg, South Africa, and I came across this fellow's stall who was selling "antique" navigational equipment (made in India). He had real sextants and the like - but given that our devices may not make it back from BM alive, I opted for the equally showy, but less functional, cheaper version. Above is the sextant (including nifty wooden storage box), a compass, and a sundial (it uses a compass and some other fancy stuff that I didn't really understand to tell time! Honest!). The sundial comes with a leather case, and all are shiny brass. Steam punk GPS.

Strange missive from Africa...

photos may follow, if the technology gods favor me...

The Green Fairy

Greetings from the un-Africa: I have a free day in this opulent hotel in an upscale neighborhood of Johannesburg, South Africa, which feels more like Pacific Heights than the Africa I know. Rather than venturing out to explore the wilderness that is the Rosebank Shopping Mall, I figure I would try the painfully slow internet and attempt my first blog entry.

Since we didn’t get around to trying Absinthe at our last get together, let’s go over the drink, and its ritual. Wikipedia has taught me much, and I shall break it down for y’all.

A brief history of the booze:
Absinthe is an anise-flavored liquor (think black licorice) that is made using flowers and leaves from Artemisia absinthium or wormwood. The first clear references to Absinthe as a drink with fennel and wormwood are dated from the 18th century, but there are records of wormwood and wormwood extracts as medicinal products as early as 1550 BC and was used by the ancient Egyptians and the Greeks. Apparently Absinthe was given to French foreign legion troops in the 1840s as a fever preventative, and when they came home, its popularity took off. By the turn of the century, it had become a very French beverage. However the move was already underway to ban the beverage (banned as early as 1898 in the Belgian Congo)!

Absinthe had been blamed on numerous murders throughout Europe, and this was attributed to the chemical thujone found in wormwood (interestingly, there is also a lot of thujone in sage and sage oil). Though hypothesized to act on the same receptors in the brain that THC uses, this was later found to be false, and the concentrations of thujone in absinthe are far too low to have this affect (pity!) – even in recipes of absinthe from the 19th century. Slowly folks came around, and since the 1990s, there has been quite a renaissance of the drink.

How’s it drunk?
Absinthe, or ‘the green fairy’ as it’s known by some, has a little ritual attached to drinking the stuff. By itself, it’s very strong (both in terms of alcohol and the various oils in it that give it its characteristic pale green color). Pour yourself a modest shot in a glass, leaving plenty of room (1). Place an absinthe (slotted) spoon over the glass, and put a sugar cube on top (2). Pour water over the sugar cube, allowing it to dissolve and melt into the glass (3). Add enough water to dilute the absinthe from 3 to 5:1. The drink should be cloudy (4), and is now ready to drink.

If you think adding this optional step may help to get you laid, try this: put the slotted spoon and sugar cube over an empty glass and pour the absinthe over it. Light the now-soaked sugar cube on fire. As the sugar cube begins to caramelize and brown, begin to pour water over it, as in step (3). Make sure her drink is a lot stronger than yours.

Bottoms up and à ta santé