Daggger

Name: Daggger
Joined On: Mar 06, 2007
Maintag: Daggger
Age: 26
Occupation: Analytical Chemist
Location: Raleigh, North Carolina
Currently: Offline
Last seen: 3/16/10

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10/03/09

Public Service Announcement

Go see Zombieland now!

Oh and everyone reading this out in 2o2p-land make sure to stay until after the credits, you can thank me later.

No, stop reading and leave.

You're still here?

Alright, here's the deal repeat the following words:

"Hunnie, I'll be back in 2 hours, Daggger just told me to go see a movie. "

"Dammit where are my keys, screw it I'm walking"

"And where are my pants, whatever, who needs pants this is Zombieland?"

Wait, you were reading my blog without pants on?

Ok Daggger that's enough . . .

This has been a public service announcement from someone who cares for you and wants you to be happy . . . um . . . preferrably with pants on.

GO SEE ZOMBIELAND RIGHT NOW!

Posted by Daggger @ 12:31 am EDT | Permalink | 4 Comments

09/26/09

Adventures in Brew-dom

Well it's been like a year and a half since my last blog and that's because I got bored with documenting my movie reviews. But I have a new interest and that interest took form earlier this afternoon in the form of Homebrewing! It's fun, it's easy, a little expensive but not prohibitively. And more importantly, you get beer as the final product.

Without further delay here's the recount of Daggger's Afternoon of September 26, 2009.

It starts like most activities start . . . with organization. You see here all the "crap" that goes into brewing, two buckets (one for fermenting, one for bottling) a bunch of plastic wear, a bottle capper and . . . um . . . ignore the cans of compressed air and tissues, haven't really entirely put away everything from my most recent grocery run . . . but whatever it's not in the way.

The shiny packages are ingredients: Malt extract from the malt barley . . . it's easier to buy the malt extract and just pour it in, instead of roasting and extracting yourself. You also see the Steeping Grains basically a primitive teabag ::giggle giggle:: for brewing. And my bottle capper which crimps the tops down on the bottles.

The other half of the counter top is covered in big spoon (straight out of a Seinfeld episode I'm going to guess), a bunch of tubing, thermometer, hydrometer, cleaning brush, syphon, and two bags of white powder which may or may not get me arrested and jumpy (ones a very strong non-sudsing cleaning agent and the other is the corn sugar to provide tasty goodness for the yeast to feed upon after bottling . . . yeah carbonation).

And final ingredient:

That's right a ton of bottles, 32 so far with ten more to be consumed in my fridge should be right around the perfect 40-50 range I need in 10-15 days.

Ok enough ingredients Daggger get to the fun stuff, the first step is über cleaning. Be careful not to confuse the bags of white powder!

Yeah Action shot!

I cleaned the brewpot by dissolving the cleaning solution then scrubbing, dumping into my fermenter bucket, scrubbing then transferring to my bottling bucket which I used as a storage vessel and soaked all my plastic wear in until use. Yeah cleanliness!

After cleaning the brewpot I filled with ~2.5 gallons of water and tossed in my Steeping Grains for 15 minutes at 155°.

Before:

Beginning:

After (water is actually a lot darker than the picture suggests):

Next was the ugliest, messiest and most fun part, adding the malt extract which is as thick and dark as mollases.

Now get to boiling . . . I had to turn my stovetop up to high and even then it just barely boiled but when tossing in the hops it took off:

60 minutes later I had beer while stirring often and keeping at boil . . . Look at that Sexy Stirrer!:

Next chill the boil down as fast and as cold as you can get it and toss it in the fermenter.

While at the same time waking up your yeast (yeast is a fun word to say yeast, yeast, yeast, yeast . . . ok Daggger focus) for 20 minutes in lukewarm water.

Next toss the yeast in the fermenter with the full volume of liquid and secure cover tightly, add the airlock to release any carbon dioxide while the yeast yeast yeast yeast yeast yeast feed for several days.

Just so we're clear the entire process is Clean everything, Water, Malt Extract, Boil, Hops, Continue to Boil, Cool, Add to Bucket, Add Yeast, Let sit for a little while . . . Beer! Seriously it really is that easy!

That's where I'm at now . . . productive day, and in 2-4 weeks I will have made a exceptionally tasty Oatmeal Stout . . . or so I hope . . . stay tuned!

Posted by Daggger @ 6:38 pm EDT | Permalink | 5 Comments

04/06/08

The Bank Job

I want to get this out of the way right out of the gate. This is a heist movie, but this is not Ocean’s Eleven, this is not Italian Job (original or remake), this is not the Thomas Crown Affair, this is not Catch me if you Can, or Swordfish, or The Score, or Entrapment.

The movie reminds me a lot of Snatch. The heist is structured more like: if I asked three of my friends to help me rob a bank and then we go do it in the same night. The movie does have a planning stage, but it’s very apparent that the “planning” was more of “this looks good but we’ll make it up on a fly” sort of plan.

A member of the British family is photographed in some “sexual” positions and a Drug dealer somehow ends up with the photographs (I do not think the acquisition of the photos is explained). Well the drug dealer is using the photos as blackmail in an effort to remain in England despite the British government knowing he’s a very, very bad man.

Bad men generally keep precious things in secret places, what better place than a bank vault safety deposit box, with tons of other safety deposit boxes. You know what’s coming next right? British government hires third party bad men to break into bank vault, crack open safety deposit boxes and steal everything including one specific box. Sexy girl is inside mole for the group and knows which box to break into. The problem comes from the contents of both that one specific box and . . . all the other safety deposit boxes.

The movie intricately weaves several different story lines a la most other British comedies you’ve seen (Snatch, Lock Stock, Two Smoking Barrels, etc. etc. etc.) It’s a smart movie. It’s well organized, and a well-told story. There is a proper mix of comedy, action, struggle, helplessness, trust, mistrust, and white knuckle stress. At times it’s violent, at times it’s funny, at times you want to scream at the screen trying to tell them not to be stupid. Finally in the end you are satisfied with the ride.

As I’ve said in past I hate giving stars but people like it.

So . . . somewhere around 3.5 out of 4 stars.

Posted by Daggger @ 1:26 pm EDT | Permalink | 1 Comments

03/19/08

Movie Reviews from (past) weekend 07Mar08

10,000 BC.

So it’s been a little bit since my last review but that’s because my life is a little crazy so . . . without further ado, let’s get to the reviewing. I saw 10,000 BC on 08MAR08 and it was . . . entertaining but cheesy. It was obvious to most of the theater patrons that cliché was the main plot drive. And 10,000 BC had every cliché available.

From the very beginning it had the plotline “loss of the father provides the son the destiny to be great”. It had “the lost beautiful girl and a sense of honor and duty drives the protagonist to get her back”, “combining forces against a common enemy”, it even had a cliché not seen very often, “hero saves beast, beast remembers the saving of it’s life and does not eat hero” along with the LAUGH OUT LOUD HILARIOUS LINE while our hero is saving the giant ferocious saber-toothed tiger. While saving the tiger he says, “I’m saving your life . . . do not eat me”. My head just about exploded! Of course he’s not going to eat you that would pretty much end the story right there.

The final planning stages and huge battle scene were enjoyable in a “fly on the wall” sorta way. Often times, with giant fight scenes, the director tries to put you inside battle, with at least one, angry enemy swinging right at the camera and one boulder rocketing right at the camera etc. This is not the normal fight scene. This battle is shot more from an “embedded reporter standpoint” as if you could report on it and you believe you won’t be injured by the implements that injure the warriors.

All in all, the movie was extremely cheesy but entertaining. Amidst all that cliché I found myself remembering and perhaps even reminiscing a little about why I enjoy watching movies and in that sense, the movie was successful. It allowed a couple hours of remembering all those clichés and watch those same clichés used in a proper setting to build upon themes and form a nice little story of hope, danger, love, loss, life, death and salvation. Finally, I will state the blatant. This is not Manchurian Candidate or Bridge Over the River Kwai, or Godfather or any of the other academy award winning serious movies. This is a movie you do to watch to be entertained. You enter the theater expecting cheesy dialog and hokie cues for the shameless kiss and the movies delivers on every single one of them.

Watch, Enjoy, and cringe at every single cliché

Stars rating:

Fake Fun stars rating 3.5 stars out of 5 for the shear cheesiness of the movie.
Real stars rating somewhere around 2 stars out of 5.

Consider yourself warned about the cringing revelry of cliché

Posted by Daggger @ 2:13 pm EDT | Permalink | 1 Comments

03/07/08

Movie Reviews weekend 29Feb08 (cont.)

Vantage Point

I saved this for last for a reason. Vantage Point is the quality movie of the current “post Oscars” movie batch. If you watch TV you’ve seen previews of this movie where Dennis Quaid acts suspenseful and you’ve seen big explosions but in the end this is a Memento movie, with slightly less . . . “what the heck is going on”. The big explosions are used for their emotional impact and not as the definition of an action movie. It is quite clear this movie is American made, as the explosion draw direct emotional similarity to the 9/11 attacks. And yes, there is a car chase and it is actually quite good, and is used as the background for a montage of “this is how everything fits together”.

As Yahoo Movies tells me, “Thomas Barnes and Kent Taylor are two Secret Service agents assigned to protect President Ashton at a landmark summit on the global war on terror. When President Ashton is shot moments after his arrival in Spain, chaos ensues and disparate lives collide in the hunt for the assassin. In the crowd is Howard Lewis, an American tourist who thinks he's captured the shooter on his camcorder while videotaping the event for his kids back home. Also there is American TV news producer Rex Brooks, relaying the historic event to millions of TV viewers across the globe. As they and others reveal their stories, the pieces of the puzzle will fall into place - and it will become apparent that shocking motivations lurk just beneath the surface.”

I copied that word for word from Yahoo Movies because that is literally what the movie is. Quickly you realize you’re about to watch a very interesting story in the “real life” time span of about 30 total minutes of time. I should mention, that the crowd I was with started laughing three times in the movie, those times are the “restart point” for the 30 minutes because the story is told from different perspectives, but it starts at exactly the same point in every black screen. The film stops and rewinds back to 23 minutes before the event for each character. Each time it stops, the audience is left on a cliffhanger which carries the film's tension into the next character. The black screen with timer countdown, to reset the plot, is comical yet effective in tying together the story. Watching the movie, intertwines many characters together perfectly to weave this into a great story-telling effort by the director (Pete Travis, this is his first big screen effort and I will definitely be looking for more of his movies).

That being said, I’ve read several rather low rated reviews for this movie and I suspect those are from people who did not enjoy Memento or were distracted by the film rewind to begin another “Vantage Point”. Vantage Point is not a mystery; the director does not try and make you solve the problems for yourself. Each “Vantage Point” is additional background to the story and not a problem to solve, however each “Vantage Point” does add additional intrigue to the movie. Avid movie watchers will attempt to guess the next plot twist, however those movie watchers who solely go to enjoy a movie, will enjoy this film, as well. I would classify this movie as somewhere between an action movie, political intrigue with an ever so small pinch of Hitchcock suspense thrown in (The Hitchcock influences are not a dominating feature).

Overall very good movie, very well done and I definitely recommend at the very least a rental of this movie. Rating: 3 stars.

Upcoming: Hopefully I’ll get to see 10,000 BC and The Bank Job.

Posted by Daggger @ 10:33 am EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

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