For Your Enjoyment #20

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The road instantly turned to mud and gravel the moment we passed the sign, and after about three turns we crested a ridge giving us a view of the Alaska we were leaving behind: civilization lay behind us now. 

- A 10,000-mile motorcycle trip from San Francisco to Alaska; the results are absolutely beautiful (image above)

George, a 10-year-old goldfish in Australia, had a relatively large tumor on its head. So George's owners brought the fish to Lort Smith Animal Hospital in Melbourne, where a veterinarian successfully performed surgery on the pet. According to the hospital, the procedure last week went ... "swimmingly."

- You don't have to give up on a sick goldfish!

The reality of living with an iPhone, or any smart, connected device, is that it makes reality feel just that little bit less real. One gets over-connected, to the point where the thoughts and opinions of distant anonymous strangers start to feel more urgent than those of your loved ones who are in the same room as you. One forgets how to be alone and undistracted. Ironically enough experiences don’t feel fully real till you’ve used your phone to make them virtual – tweeted them or tumbled them or Instagrammed them or YouTubed them, and the world has congratulated you for doing so. 

- Is Apple technology taking over our bodies and our lives?

"We're celebrating the elegance of the past and embracing some qualities that have been left behind - poise and decency. The DecoBelles do mid-range kicks, the Charleston and a dance with hats. It's very cute and charming. We don't twerk."

- SF Gate reports on The Art Deco Society of California's annual Gatsby Summer Afternoon (h/t DM)

For our generation – a shoulder demographic between Generation X and the millennials – this was one of our movies, a film that managed, however oddly, to capture the ineffable feeling of being a (white, straight) quasi-alienated teenager in a very specific time.

- BuzzFeed takes a look at the belated success and enduring impact of 90s cult classic "Empire Records"

“It’s like winning the lottery,” Rothblatt said happily, about seeing her name atop the list of America’s 200 highest-paid CEOs]. But Rothblatt could not be less interested in establishing herself as a role model for women. “I can’t claim that what I have achieved is equivalent to what a woman has achieved. For the first half of my life, I was male,” she said.

- The life of Martine Rothblatt, the 59-year-old transgendered founder and CEO of United Therapeutics

The unsavory manifestations of Lovecraft’s dread can’t be surgically removed from his fiction by an act of willful blindness, as some fans seem to think. To the contrary, they help us to understand it, but to do that we need to be able to accept the truth that even great artists – greater ones than Lovecraft, certainly – have their ugly sides, and that ugliness can be inextricable from their greatness.

- Trying to separate Lovecraft's work from his documented racism

IS has achieved something scarcely conceivable in the Middle East by uniting the bitterest of foes in a common purpose.

- The Economist examines the messy political allegiances of the Middle East

Current Obsessions

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In defense of pumpkin beer

You probably hate pumpkin beer. You are wrong.

Pumpkin beer has become a punch line, unfairly lumped in with all the truly terrible pumpkin-flavored products that infect our lives each fall. It's not just the Pumpkin Spice Latte. There are now Pumpkin Spice Oreos, Pumpkin Spice Eggo Waffles, and Pumpkin Pie Spice Pringles. There were even rumors — thankfully proven false — of a pumpkin pie spice condom.

So maybe it's not your fault that you hate pumpkin beer. We have reached peak pumpkin, and it's not even technically fall yet. Blame the nefarious Pumpkin Spice Industrial Complex.

When it comes to beer, pumpkin-flavored offerings have also moved from the margins to the mainstream. Pumpkin beer is no longer an innovative novelty, but a ubiquitous presence on store shelves as early as August.

Understandably, drinkers are miffed about this pumpkin interloper invading their booze. But the backlash has grown so shrill it's devolved into fatuous faux-outrage and, worse, outright condescension.

Here's the thing though: Pumpkin beer is great. Not all of it, of course. But there are a number of delicious, well-balanced takes on the style.

Southern Tier's Pumking is a classic example of the style done right. It's a bit on the sweet side, but it features graham cracker notes and a hint of vanilla that give it a more rounded flavor than most other pumpkin brews. Cigar City's Good Gourd rates not just as a great pumpkin beer, but as a fantastic beer, period, with a 96 score on Beer Advocate. Even Harvest Moon, from pseudo-craft brewery Blue Moon, is a decent iteration that doesn't go overboard on the spice notes.

When done right, pumpkin beer still tastes like beer. Good beer. Subtle spice and a hint of pumpkin add a comforting, warm layer to beer's inherent goodness, making the style perfect for sipping all through the fall.

Sure, there are plenty of horrible, over-spiced, too-sweet pumpkin beer concoctions that taste as if someone liquefied a stale pumpkin pie — metal tray and all — and carbonated it. But there are also a bunch of delicious pumpkin beers. Stop impugning their honor.

And is it any surprise that more and more pumpkin beers exist each year? For all the vaunted independence of the craft beer industry, it is still an industry, a capitalistic enterprise. Breweries make what people are drinking, and what the market demands. Pumpkin beer is incredibly popular and enormously profitable. Though IPA sales typically outpace those of seasonal offerings by 300,000 cases or so per month, fall seasonals led IPA sales by 300,000 cases in October and November last year, according to the Brewer's Association. Moreover, sales of the top pumpkin beers from 2012 leapt a ludicrous 366 percent over a four-week stretch in 2013, indicating the market is still soaring.

And while you may be horrified at the thought of Natt-o-Lantern, this trend is actually great for the craft beer industry as a whole.

First, the booming sales of pumpkin beer boost the profits of craft breweries, allowing them to grow and better compete with the big guys. Craft beer sales rose 17.2 percent last year, and anything that helps craft breweries continue to grow apace is welcome news for fans of variety, innovation, and flavor.

Second, pumpkin beer is a gateway beer. It is a stepping stone from macro swill to the wide variety of styles and tastes craft beer has to offer.

The first ever craft beer (non-Sam Adams division) I can remember trying was Shipyard Pumpkinhead Ale. Alongside the PBR I was used to chugging in college, it immediately vaulted to top of my fledgling "Best Beers Ever" list. Today? I wouldn't touch the stuff. But Pumpkinhead was the first brew to pique my interest in craft beer as an alternative beverage, leading me to try more good beers — including, yes, good pumpkin beers — down the road.

Writing off an entire style of beer to burnish your beer snob cred, or because you hate seasonal pumpkin creep, is misguided. And in doing so, you're keeping yourself from enjoying a drink with a rich place in American history.

So shut up and drink up. Pumpkin beer is great.

- The Week knows what's up

Fave vs. Fav, A Linguistic Explanation

On Monday afternoon, The New York Times published an article with the following headline: "Save the Fav, Twitter’s Digital Body Language," igniting a debate on Twitter about the proper spelling for the shorthand of Twitter's favorite button. Some people fave, others fav.

The New York Times, it seems, prefers fav, but defaults to faves plural. The Atlantic and The Washington Post have both used "fave" in headlines. But The (Atlantic) Wire says fav. (One of the people quoted in that story, Mat Honan, prefers to fav faves.) Urban Dictionary has entries for both, as does the Oxford English Dictionary. Although, none of the definitions mentions Twitter in particular.

There's no consistency--so what's right? Fast Company reached out to a linguist, who prefers to remain anonymous, for enlightenment. Her thoughts:

Fave is more phonologically right based on English spelling rules. Fav is more true to an abbrev(e?) of the written word because there is no 'e' in it.

The moral: BLECH WHATEVER

We asked the copy desk of The New Yorker to weigh in; will update with comment about this important issue. Like the never-ending GIF pronunciation debate, both are right. Yet, people will continue to debate each spelling's rightness for years to come.

Because even when the debate about the spelling dies down, there's always pronunciation. As Stanford-trained linguist and data scientist Tyler Schnoebelen points out, the missing "e" from "fav" can create some concerns--namely, "of 79 words that end in -ave in the CMU Pronunciation Dictionary, 63% are pronounced like brave, cave, Dave, gave, pave, rave, wave. Or crave." There is always the case of "have," but Schnoebelen says that most people know that that is a "weird" case. "So 'fave' is probably the easiest to indicate what I take to be the predominant pronunciation," he writes in email.

One other possibility exists: that "fav" is like "Mojave." "It's unlikely someone will pronounce it that way," Schnoebelen writes, "although I would love to hear someone do that."

Update, 6:03 p.m.: The New Yorker has picked a favorite! From their copy desk: "We don't have a style on the short form of "to favorite," but if we did we would probably favor 'fave.'"

Update, 10:45 p.m.: It might be a verb noun thing, says linguist and Wall Street Journal language columnist Ben Zimmer. He likens the debate to "mic" versus "mike." "Some people prefer 'fav' as a noun and 'fave' as a verb, which parallels usage of 'mic' and "miked," he told Fast Company. "This happens with any new technology and the lingo surrounding it. For an earlier case, see '(tele)phone.'" 

- Fave v. Fav