That's like hypnotizing chickens

Had a good time at a conference and a concert. More about those later; for now, I owe you an entry about chicken (oh, and I realize Trader Joe is now less apropos (poet/know it), but I also recently tried their Port Salut cheese (I am on kind of a cheese thing at the moment), and made a Cape Cod with their cranberry and pomegranate juice, and can't recommend either highly enough.)

So, chicken. I've been generally experimenting a little bit more with food lately, now that I feel like I have the time and discretionary income to do so (even though I probably have neither). And a little over a week ago, I said "I should roast a chicken! Wouldn't that be fun?" Upon giving the matter some thought, I realized that I hadn't ever roasted a chicken before. Sure, I use chicken parts on a regular basis, and I've helped other people when they had whole chickens to prepare for various reasons, but the need to make myself a chicken was apparently not one that had come up in the last 27 years.
Clearly this needed to be remedied.
I immediately thought of the Beer Can Chicken recipe in the Achewood cookbook, and went to go find a six-pack of suitably substandard lager. As it turns out, all of the six-packs of beer that I might consider getting were at least a dollar more expensive than a 12-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon, which I wouldn't consider getting. However, since I figured I wasn't likely to drink it either way, I decided I might as well save a dollar, and inflict the surplus beer on my roommates, whose taste in such things is, if the contents of our fridge are any indication, atrocious. Oh, we have a new fridge by the way. Good thing, too. The old one was getting dirty.
The downside to my selection of terrible beer was, as I discovered, that the recipe calls for half a can of beer. "Ugh," I said, drinking the other half. Then I poured the onion powder, pepper, and salt into the can, along with a bay leaf for good measure, and vaguely recalled something about the effects of adding salt to beer. Whereupon the can erupted onto the counter with flawless comedic timing. I sighed, reread the recipe, inferred that when it said "pour all the seasonings into the beer can," that this did not include the salt or pepper, and prepared another half can of onion-powdered hipster swill.

About an hour later, the chicken was done, and it was nice and moist and the skin came out super crunchy. The leftovers were good too; I had them with tandoori naan and prefab palak paneer, and they went surprisingly well together. And, true to my prediction, it was kind of fun. Also if anyone wants to come over and drink 10 cans of PBR, please do.

There's a starman waiting in the sky

You may have heard about this. My giddy enthusiasm is somewhat tempered by the suspicion that this game will probably not come out until 2009, if at all. Although from what I hear, it is mostly done (although in that case I wish they'd preview more than just the Protoss, cool and lasery though they may be), so maybe Blizzard has learned from its mistakes?

I wrote up a really nice entry about chicken, but I'll post it some other time because right now I feel like talking about backgammon. Simon and I recently played a game of backgammon as part of a very entertaining competition, and having not played it in basically a thousand years, I was reminded that it is both fun and fairly unique.
In particular, the spirit of the game feels very different from most. I may just totally be projecting here, but it seems like the fundamental point of it is to make the most of one's bad luck. If players consistently got the right rolls, their pieces would simply progress more-or-less pairwise right off the board, and the winner would be the one who rolled slightly higher numbers. What keeps the game interesting the fact that players will, sooner or later, roll the dice in a way that forces them to leave one or more pieces vulnerable. The rest of the game, then, is all about finessing the situation in order to minimize the potential risk to your pieces, and maximize it to your opponent's. I find this sort of pessimism really refreshing. Most board games, like chess, scrabble, monopoly, checkers (to an extent) are proactive and creative; the point is to amass your strength more successfully than the other player. (Card games are also a lot like this, with some exceptions, such as hearts, though the scoring and gameplay are a lot more abstract than in a game in which you're running your pieces through a gauntlet.) More ambiguous cases include Othello and possibly Go, but the difference there is that they're deterministic. Whereas in backgammon the players are competing as much against chance as against each other, though at the same time they are agents of chance, conscripted by means of a zero-sum game into directing its vagaries and thereby effecting certain outcomes to the best of their ability.
Or maybe I'm making way too much of this.

Peanut butter jelly with a baseball bat

So I'm at work, running subjects. Aside from taking a sample every once in a while, this requires that I flip some switches every 7 minutes or so, and there's not much other work I can do from here. Hence the blogging.

...I've been giving some more thought to talky morning DJs, and am beginning to at least understand the reason for their existence. People who drive some appreciable distance to work each day would probably get tired of the station's same old programming, and might enjoy both the variety and second-hand social interaction provided by tooth-gnashingly inane chatter. Though this theory is perhaps corroborated by the existence of evening talk (such as the "Five o'clock funnies," which presumably serves a corresponding function for the end-of-day commute), you will note that it completely fails to explain why the DJs have to suck.
Okay I'm done talking about morning DJs. Here are some more chemosensory observations for you:

1) Double cream gouda is so delicious. With increasing frequency of late, I have been suffering darker moments of existential doubt, in which I would lie awake at night and reflect that maybe I was beginning to get a little bit bored with smoked gouda. But this stuff has completely renewed my interest in all things goudish.
2) I don't know what peanut butter smells like. It's one of the smells that we have people identify for their initial screening, and when I tried it, I totally guessed "wood shavings" instead.
Okay, look. It is not that weird. I am not the only person who has done that. And smells can actually be pretty tricky when there aren't any other sensory cues.
The important thing about it is that I used to really hate the smell of peanut butter, but apparently I've since forgotten what it's like. And with it, I've lost a vital weapon in the War on Involuntary Anaphylaxis.

With flaming locks of auburn hair

So, I've been listening to the radio kind of a lot, both in the shower every morning, and then frequently on the way to and from work. Now, when I was unemployed, this was great, especially since 91x has this "Resurrection Lunch" thing that frequently coincided with my showers, in which they play older stuff (including, for some reason, the same Psychedelic Furs song every day, but I digress) rather than their normal uneven and repetitive fare. I swear to God, I've heard that insipid Peter, Bjorn and John song so damn many times I think it's actually starting to grow on me. Wait. I'm still digressing. The main thing I was going to say is that morning DJs are terrible. They even have DJs on the Jack station! What the hell is that? I refuse to believe that anybody actually likes listening to these people, and must conclude that their existence is the result of some massive conspiracy to inflict suffering on an unwilling audience.
Consequently, I've been listening to a lot of jazz lately.

Another thing I'd like to talk about today is red hair. What is the deal with red hair, anyways. There is lots of evidence that red hair is not well-regarded on dudes. Hitsch, Hortascu, and Ariely went through data from an online dating service and found that males with red hair get fewer first-contact emails, and I remember seeing some survey in which 0% of respondents preferred redheads to dudes with blond or brown hair. That is not a lot of percents.
Anecdotally, however, it seems like lots of people actually do like my hair. Assuming the studies are correct, this leads to three explanations that I can think of: 1) while their hair may be nice, redheads are unpleasant in other ways that offset this (...freckles?), 2) my experiences, memories thereof, and/or the people I encounter are severely unrepresentative, or 3) you people are lying to me about liking my hair :-(