Games

The players cooperate to explore the "House on the Hill"
... until one of them turns traitor

I've been playing and thinking about games a lot. Haymarket House has an excellent collection of board, card, and other games. I've been interested in cooperative games (not in the game theory sense) as a result of playing Pandemic! and Betrayal at House on the Hill.

In the purest form of these games, the entire group of players wins or loses together. As its title might indicate, "Betrayal" introduces a competitive element (usually one "traitor" against the group) partway through, though the first portion of the game is entirely cooperative.

I really enjoy these games: it feels good to use the resources of the game playing group to work against the game, rather than against each other. "Pandemic," for instance, is very difficult, and winning without bending the rules feels great for everyone involved.

As a result of my fascination with this kind of gameplay, I've been working on a set of rules for a cooperative game. If you are interested in proof-reading these rules, let me know.

I'm looking for readers who play games and like conceptualizing rules. In particular, I'm hoping to find places where players can, whether through malicious intent or through accidental action, find themselves in a place where the rules are inadequate or do not apply.

The other thing is that I'm conceiving this game as a live-action game, to be played in downtown Chicago.

More to come as it develops!

Go Trolls!

There he is.

Today, a blue Prius drove through the intersection at 55th and Dorchester. Painted on its side: Trinity Christian College. Painted on the back: Go Trolls!

It turns out that Trinity Christian College, located in Palos Heights, southwest of Chicago, has a large blue troll for its mascot. Knowing anything about internet slang, and the propensity of some Christians' behavior as internet commenters, a troll seems like the last thing a Christian college would want for a mascot.

No one (that I could find in my five minutes of googling) seems to see any connection or negative repercussions for the trolls here (e.g. this sports site or the school's own athletics dept. page).

Roasting: Outliers

Green (unroasted) coffee.

Haymarket House has a gas stove, so one of the first things I did upon arrival was to order some green (unroasted coffee). Gas stoves are much better than electric stoves when it comes to temperature control, and temperature control is essential for a good roast.

This post isn't the place to go into all that roasting coffee entails (for that, check here), but I will provide some tasting notes. All of the coffees that I ordered are unusual in some way or another, and roasting well (as I feel I did) them marks a new threshold in my roasting abilities.

Aged Sumatra Aceh

This is the most exotic of the coffees in the lot that I ordered. It was harvested in 2007, and sat in a dark warehouse until recently. Aging coffee is unusual: since it often results in a dulled flavor, few people are eager to produce it (plus, you tie up your warehouse for a few years holding perfectly sellable coffee). I am still not certain how folks go about aging coffees in such a way as to market them as "aged coffee." What I do know is that this method is only common in Sumatra. I roasted it twice, both times to a medium-dark profile, and it didn't disappoint. Spicy, musky and wood (cedar!) notes dominated over a silky body.

Brazil Modgliani Peaberry Natural Process

Two things make this coffee stand out from other coffees from Brazil (land of otherwise unremarkable coffee): every bean is a peaberry -- little round beans that roll differently in the roaster; and the beans were processed via the "natural process" -- the coffee fruit was removed after (rather than before) the beans were laid out in the sun to dry. Counter Culture Coffee is currently offering a natural process Ethiopian coffee which shines with blueberry and raspberry notes. This coffee was not nearly as dramatic. The fruit notes were there, over a complex, full body, but I was a little disappointed. My roasting error, probably. I'll be seeking out more natural process coffees as my roasting improves, and I still have some left to roast.

Ethiopia Yirga Cheffe Grade 1

This one was a bit of a splurge, but totally worth it. As with most of these coffees, I made two separate roasts (I get a pound at a time, and my roaster maxes out at 8oz.). The first one was very surprising: a very light body, tons of tea and lemongrass flavors. One of my housemates took a sip and thought that it WAS tea. These are the classic signs of underroasting, so in my second roast, I used less heat, but for longer time. The tea-like flavors returned, this time backed up by the floral sweetness that Yirgacheffe fans love. I hit the nail on the head with this one, I'm proud to report.

Yemen Mokha Ismaili

Mocha (Moka, Mokha, etc.) is the port that first shipped coffee to the West. People there were confused, and really into drinking hot chocolate at the time, and so Mocha is (sort of) responsible for the name of the drink that people order at coffeeshop when they want espresso mixed with chocolate

What made this coffee unusual was the instructions to "let rest three days before drinking." Most coffees are allowed to rest (left in an open container to allow CO2 to escape) for 12-24 hours immediately after roasting, before being sealed. I still don't know why this coffee must rest for so long, but I tried my first batch (a medium roast with notes of fig and chocolate in the cup) and it was delicious. The second batch is waiting its three days, so I'll report back once I've tasted it.

At the Library

The Blackstone Branch of the Chicago Public 
Library (where this story happened) is beautiful, btw.

The other day, as I was locking my bike by the library, a passer-by, unbidden, explained to me about a place where I could get a free bike. Not wanting to be unkind, I listened, the whole time wondering "why do you think I need a bike when I'm standing here locking up my bike?"

Then he told me that his bike was a limited edition Schwinn racer from the seventies, and that there were only fifty of them in existence. It was sky blue, and I believed him.

Downtown Sound

I've been listening to Abigail Washburn's music since her first album, Sparrow Quartet, came out in 2008. This past Monday, she played a free show here in Chicago. Heather and I arrived an hour and a half early, ate a sushi picnic on the Great Lawn at the Pritzker Pavilion, then moved down to get seats in the tenth row.



We got to see Washburn and her band (a guitarist and a fiddler, in addition to Washburn herself on banjo) sound check -- working on their arrangements, they decided to include a fiddle solo during which Washburn tap danced in front of a foot-level microphone. She laughed, swirling her arms as she danced. "It's so much harder when I have to think about how it sounds," she said after the mic was rigged.

It's been a while since I've been to a concert by a musician whose work I know from recordings (the Low Anthem in Harrisburg, maybe?), so it was great to hear songs I know reinterpreted live. Watching Washburn perform live, particularly with Kai Welch, her songwriting partner on her latest album, gave new insight on some of the music. She retold the story about "Taiyang Chulai"that you can see in the video above, and mentioned that her husband had walked in while she was writing "If I Had A Shotgun" (a darkly comic murder ballad). "He walked away pretty quick," she said.

If Abigail Washburn was a new insight into music that I love, the second act on the double bill was more of an unknown. From the moment that the band (trumpet, bari sax, organ, drums, bass, guitar) launched into a driving soul vamp, however, I was excited. "Please welcome," growled the organist, taking the still-vacant lead singer's mic, "The original Black Swan, the Screaming Eagle of Soul, the one, the only MISTER CHAAAAAAARLES BRAAAAAADLEY!"



Bradley has an inspiring life story and a charismatic stage presence. He tossed the microphone away from himself, and caught it while kneeling on the stage, yelling like James Brown. Before he was signed to Daptone Records (a familiar name, perhaps, to those who have heard Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings), Bradley performed as a James Brown impersonator. While this show captured that 70s funk-soul vibe to a tee -- with Bradley's vest open to his belly button and his horn players doing a synchronized two-step throughout the entirety of the show -- he sang all original material, centering on lyrics promoting love and togetherness. Washburn, introducing him, referred to him as the "Dalai Lama of Soul," saying "He gave me a hug and it felt like I was floating."

I didn't get a hug from the one and only Mister Charles Bradley, but throughout the night, there were some moments of floating.

Totoro

While at the apartment of my neighbors the other night, we all watched Hayao Miazaki's My Neighbor Totoro.


Though I have interest in both children's literature and film, and took a class on Japanese film, somehow I missed out on this gem.


Roger Ebert hits the nail on the head when he writes that "My Neighbor Totoro is based on experience, situation and exploration — not on conflict and threat." Unlike the majority of children's movies (and to be fair, I don't watch that many) this is not a movie where the plucky heroines must defeat any sort of evil, find any sort of treasure, or any other standard plot. Instead, it is a movie about growing up, about sibling relationships, and about the wonder of childhood.

Totoro itself (the gender of the title character is never made clear) is a huge, hilariously aloof forest spirit who, for this viewer, anyway, served as a revealing metaphor for the divine. While watching Totoro perform (with his two tiny colleagues) a mystical growing dance, while watching him delight in the drops of rain on his umbrella, and while watching him roar, not in menace, but... well, it's not always  clear why Totoro is roaring, but while watching all of these activities, it reminds me of the Christian triune God: Mysterious, joyful, and very much embodied in the world of humans, even as It transcends it.

Happy Birthday Woody!

Today (the one-month anniversary of my arrival in Chicago) would mark the hundredth birthday of the one and only Woody Guthrie. He said this awhile back:

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I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim, too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. 


I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops. No matter what color, what size you are, how you are built. I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. 


I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think you've not got any sense at all. 


But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your song books are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow. 


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To hear some music written, performed, and inspired by Woody Guthrie, check out NPR's The Mix.