On Vario

Troubling times: Swine flu is threatening to go pro (as in pandemic), and even worse is that the Flames got eliminated yesterday in a series that went from a nicely matched one to an utterly embarassing slaughter. Okay, maybe I’m being melodramatic (and not dramatic enough about the swine flu, but I’ve been castigated before, on this very site, for being deluded), but hockey really does matter here (“here” being Canada, not just in Calgary), it defines the local ethos, it’s something that one can’t help getting swept up in, and when Mighty Casey strikes out (sorry about mixing metaphors), it’s, well, it’s tragic.

Add to all that: the damned weather. Yes, it’s Spring, absolutely, the tulips and those bizarre weeds with the oak-crossed-with-clover leaves, the little turmeric staining flowers and as I discovered last week the bizarrely orange (and even more turmeric-like) roots are growing; the trees and bushes are budding in some rare cases starting to leaf out, and the days are, regardless of the temps, really getting long en route to “too long” in a few weeks. BUT it’s cold, no-shorts cold, and it’s depressing. High today was maybe 2 and it was blustery and mostly gray to boot. So, yeah, it’s my sort of elongated “summer” but too much negative stuff in the way to enjoy it.

So I bought a new toy. My clever title is a pun- the “Vario” is the new coffee grinder from Baratza, the folks who made an outrageously big-selling burr grinder for Starbucks, and the makers of the well-respected Virtuoso and Maestro, which are both relatively inexpensive but good-quality consumer machines that are not especially well-reviewed for the demands of espresso, which has finer, and more exacting, grinding requirements than do drip or French press brewing methods. In fact one often hears that the grinder is more important than the espresso machine and I’m inclined to agree. I can get decent espresso, if I have to, from my 15-year-old Krups Espresso Novo, which I paid $130 for; but if I had to use a cheap grinder (like my old Braun) with my $1600 Elektra Leva espresso machine, I’d get nothing but crap from it, because the Braun could simply not grind fine enough for espresso and its burrs were tiny and cheap.

I already have a good grinder- a Rancilio Rocky with a “doser,” which is the paddle that you see baristas thwack-thwacking the coffee grounds out of the grinder and into the portafilter with at most caffes. Brian bought it for me (well, for us really) here in Calgary at, I think, Mr Cappuccino, and that was less than four years ago. It still works and I’ve done a pretty good job of keeping it clean. But it’s beaten up, with a cracked bean receptacle and a broken spring for the doser. I also wanted a doserless grinder, one that grinds directly into the portafilter instead of having to do the “thwack thwack,” a procedure that’s supposed to deposit a measured amount of grounds into the filter but one that is very imprecise in that regard and that requires a superfluous extra step for me. Dosing does break up clumps in the grounds, but there are downsides to it for me, including the fact that my machine (my Elektra, not my Brasilia) has a nonstandard (small) sized portafilter, so I can’t play professional barista and dose into the portafilter; instead I dose into this little tupperware container and then feed it into my portafilter. I wanted to not do that anymore. One more thing: Rocky is loud. Not as loud as many grinders, but loud enough when our bedroom and kitchen share a wall.

So I’d been reading product overviews of the Vario on coffeegeek and elsewhere and decided this past weekend to give it a whirl. It turns out that Phil and Sebastian (Calgary Farmers’ Market, see “places I like”) are stocking  it, so I took the plunge. $489 (Canadian), a few bucks more than I’d seen it list at the only other Canadian source I could find, but that was in Vancouver, so here we are. My coffee shrine looks like this now:

Left to right are the Elektra Microcasa a Leva, Brasilia Lady, and the Vario. The Leva has to be to one side or the other so we can open the upper cupboard.

Closeup of Vario:

There are lots of buttons. What they do is allow you to grind “manually” for however long you care to (up to two minutes I think) or to use preset times for grinding. I measured beans and did the former to allow me to determine how long it took to grind a dose of beans for each of my espresso machines, and then I easily programmed the buttons below it, using the “espresso” button for the Leva and the “drip” button for the Lady. These buttons do NOT change the GRIND of the coffee, but rather the amount of coffee that is ground. I dialed in the grind using the guides to the right and left of the panel. The right slider is “macro” level with fineness increasing bottom to top (top is labelled “espresso,” which is confusing and misleading- more on that in a bit); the right slider is a micro-level “fineness” setting for each of the “macro” settings. Think of it like derailleurs on a bike: One gear shifts the “macro” front gears, and you have five to seven gradations in the back, set with the other gear shifter, for each of those front cogs. Same thing here (I think; not sure about “cogs”).

So I’ve deduced, for now, that it takes 22 seconds to grind a double in the Lady’s big 58mm bottomless portafilter, so I’ve programmed the button labelled “filter” for that espresso machine:

…and 14.5 seconds for the smaller Elektra, whose portafilter is 49mm in diameter. Same grind–they both make espresso–but a smaller amount of coffee, and so I’ve programmed the button labelled “espresso” for it:

These settings I arrived at via trial and error. Fun and delicious trial and error.

NOW you may notice that the right slider is nowhere near “espresso,” and this is what I was getting at when I mentioned how these labels are misleading. I tried my first espresso with the setting at “espresso,” slider up to the top, and the COARSEST “micro” setting, expecting a gusher with such “coarse” grinds. Nope, not even close; the coffee was like Turkish powder and not a single drop came out. Too fine- WAY to fine. I had to (after many tries) go three full “macro” clicks from the top. What this means is, given this grinder’s factory settings (which can be reset but which I lack the proper tool for), “espresso” is going to be closer to the middle of the settings. This isn’t just confusing; it also means that the “press” setting will be way too fine even at the very bottom of both sliders. Now I don’t drink much French press at all, but this is still a bit concerning and I’d like to get it readjusted- but the problem there is having to relearn the settings I have now, settings I burnt though more than a half pound of coffee beans to uncover. But I’ll think about that later. The point for now is that Baratza might have made things simpler by just labelling both sliders “coarse” and “fine” and by just labelling the bottom timed buttons, I don’t know, maybe just “1,2,3.”

I can say that I am THRILLED with the shots I’ve been getting, the quiet and the sexy build of this new grinder, and that I’m more than happy with my purchase. Some kinks remain to be worked out, naturally, but there’s a lot to be excited about here.

My “debate” with Jeffrey Simpson

Remember when Dubya came to Calgary on March 17, and that imbecilic parrot at the Globe and Mail, Jeffrey Simpson, wrote, “There he was, in perhaps the only city in Canada that would have him”? Okay, the man said “perhaps,” but to today’s topic: Toronto is hosting George W Bush. Yes, with Bill Clinton, but that’s not the point. Clinton has spoken in Calgary, twice since I’ve lived here. The fucking Dalai Lama is coming to Calgary. So I don’t give a rat’s ass whom W is sharing the stage with, how his talk is organized, under what guise, or even how many people are protesting. None of this matters, because Simpson and his ilk didn’t care about any of these details for Calgary- especially the fact that this was not “Calgary” bringing him here, but our Chamber of Commerce. So NOTHING gets Toronto off the hook for this, because NOTHING was offered to give any sort of perspective on his trip here (including, for example, the fact that there was EXACTLY as little support for Bush in Calgary prior to his 2004 election as there was in Toronto, and less than in places like Man-Sask and the Maritimes). So I wrote this email to Jeffrey Simpson:

So Calgary was the only city that would have Bush? Your beloved
Toronto is hosting the war criminal now- so where’s your apology?
We’ll love to see it.

John Manzo
Calgary

And, to my suprise, he replied:

As I don’t live in Toronto it’s not beloved of me and never has been. Shake off your prejudices. That anyone would pay Bush is a terrible indictment of them wherever they are.

Oh, the irony. Yes, he’s telling me that I have “prejudices” for, I guess, assuming that he has a thing for Toronto, making himself look willfully ignorant and utterly missing the point. So I replied:

Please don’t arrogate to lecture me on “prejudices” when you wrote
what you wrote about Calgary, castigating the country’s third most
diverse city because some morons at our Chamber of Commerce decided it
would be a coup to bring that war criminal here.

I love Toronto, it was the first city I emigrated to (from the US, in
2000) and would never stereotype the entire city based on the decision
of whoever organised this fiasco to bring Bush there. You, on the
other hand, are all too happy to stereotype Calgary and Calgarians on
that basis- so which of us is “prejudiced”?

And he issues his one-word zinger back:

Baloney.

No idea what’s “baloney” in my email, but I tried again:

You’re right, my mistake, I emigrated in 1997 (to Toronto) and moved
to Calgary in 2000. I do get befuddled sometimes.

I wish you’d had the perspective–and the bizarre thing is that you
SHOULD have the perspective–to write a book about “Maple Leaf
Americans” like me, but I guess that task falls to somebody else.

jm

This last bit was a reference to a book he wrote a few years back called Star Spangled Canadians about how much Canada sucks ass and how they were departing in droves, droves I tells ya, to the US, all as part of a fabrication that the Globe was married to (but has since dropped, as facts got in the way and even they could not maintain the myth) that they referred to as our “brain drain.” Canada was then and is still, by far, a net importer of brains but that sort of fact doesn’t sell papers as much as pessimistic navel-gazing. But that sort of self-hate was soooo 1998; bashing Alberta is the new M.O. of Simpson and here we are. And no, he didn’t reply to my last email.

To the present: classes over, papers to be marked, big final exam tomorrow night and all ducks appear to be in a row for it, spring has ABSOLUTELY sprung, Flames are 1-2 in playoffs vs Chicago but hope is still around after two close Chicago wins and a convincing victory by the good guys at the Dome yesterday (game 4 tonight will tell the story), and Vancouver swept St Louis for a very impressive entry into round two- congrats, Canucks.

One more week

…and another semester, and another academic year, is in the books. This year seemed to last so long; maybe this was because it was the first regular “full” year after my fall 2007 sabbatical (meaning that last “year” went by in a blink since I only taught in the winter semester), maybe because this year contained a couple of major trips that I anticipated hugely (Singapore-Malaysia over Christmas and Berlin over reading week), and maybe I’m just becoming jaded and ever more eager to get to summer. Even more jaded, I mean.

On that note (the “summer” note; not the “jaded” note), despite a March that comprised some of the suckiest weather imaginable and lots and lots and lots of snow, SPRING is not only here officially (it started March 20) and what I think of as “unofficially” (the date that would have been the start of DST under the old rules) but also practically and evidently, because the tulips are looking great. Much better than last year, this year’s are a bumper crop and we’re praying for no week-long string of below-freezing temps and heavy snow that happened last April 19-26, roughly. Here are my adopted babies:

Not a lot else happening garden-wise. There are buds, big ready-to-burst ones, on poplars but most trees and bushes still look to be in winter slumber, but give that a few days. There IS a clear other “bumper crop” out there and it’s this odd and incredibly fecund weed (for lack of a better word) that I’d never seen before last year and that took over big swaths of the perennial patch last year as well- it has leaves that are lobed sort of like oak leaves and flowers with tiny yellow flowers that are messy, like turmeric if you brush against them. I can see them all over the yard, just under the snow and ready to GROW, and this is yet another reason why I want to get rid of the ridiculous and poorly-planned overabundance of “flowers” in our yard. I could never tend to them before and now, with this invasive plant, it’s just impossible. Some of the plants I love, I do, and I never expected to think that way (to reiterate and clarify: we INHERITED the garden when we bought the house, not knowing that the last gardender had some strain of OCD with symptoms including over-planting perennials, doing horrible, incompetent home “repairs” and not understanding simple ways to keep mice from entering one’s home). I especially love- adore, adore- our clematises, but a lot of these I can do without, to be blunt. BUT it’s hard not to see this growth now and to be happy about it.

And of course time shuttles forward and I have to decide what to do this summer. Our bi-annual progress reports are due in… July? I think it’s July, and as my last two years have been not unproductive I’m not worried about mine. What I am curious about is what we might expect with regard to our next contract. Our provincial budget came out last week and we’re in the red for the first time in many years (though this figure hinges on energy revenues being as predicted, and this number is ALWAYS underestimated, so we’ll see whether the deficit is as big, or as extant, as predicted). I’m not worried about my job, for goodness’ sake. I get that question sometimes, and it’s expected that some people would read about cutbacks to universities’ funding and think that this means that professors might lose their jobs. This would be analogous to a US Senator losing his job when the economy tanks. Never gonna happen, at least not for us who have tenure, but I’ve honestly never heard of university professors EVER losing their jobs for budget reasons. I HAVE heard of non-tenured profs getting the boot when their programs were dissolved, for reasons budgetary or discretionary or enrolment-related, but I can’t think of a single case, in North America at least, where a prof was “let go” because the uni couldn’t afford his or her salary. But having said all that, I can’t not be curious. The U of C has seen salary cuts in the past, in the early ’90s, and I hope that doesn’t happen again. But it’s not as if I’m losing sleep over this. I have plenty of other things to lose sleep over.

Which brings me to this rant… NOT! I have SHITLOADS of things that are pissing me off these days, but I’m not going to get into them for the main reason that I wouldn’t know where to start. But they all pretty much boil down to MEDIA MISREPRESENTATIONS and MORAL (and other) PANICS. About crime, about the economy, about bylaws, about “the arts,” about (again and again and again) what a bunch of “rednecks” we are alleged to be in Calgary, about the Flames… and actually the Flames have been sucking unbelievably lately and not in a good way, but the playoffs are a new season, so who knows.

For all the suckitude of late, there are some happy things to report. Lots of them. The flowers. A string of gorgeous weather that almost gives me amnesia about the horrid winter. Brian’s great successes with his work (enough to see him, at long last, rent some office space outside his “world HQ,” which has been our living room for something like three years now). A new and SUPERB sushi place one block over called O Shima Japanese Cuisine (look for them on facebook!), with Ali Baba, Jaro Blue, Shawarma Knight, Oishii Village, Moti Mahal, Sammy’s Donair, 1410 Bier Haus, Vogglio Pizza, and the opening on Monday of the third location of Green Chili, in addition to lots that I’m not remembering right now, all of which show that the number and variety of dining options that are steps from our home is becoming downright staggering. Anniversary #14 on the horizon. A trip to Seattle in late May (first visit there since 1985!) on the horizon. Summer on the horizon.

Okay, more filler than killer here, but at least I’m writing. Ciao for now.

The lion kills the hippo and they go to heaven.

I hope this link doesn’t turn into a pumpkin, or a hippo:

http://vimeo.com/2113477