The other, more speculative endeavor is turning our VW Jetta into a greaser. With diesel over $4, probably for the long term, refining our own fuel becomes viable. I have little question as to what is the responsible, virtuous course would constitute. But I look at the actuality of buying a biodiesel refiner and making our own fuel, I become incredulous at the surreality. Maybe that’s my cultural conditioning in specialization and consumption, something that, if current trends hold, becomes a liability and something to strive to throw off. But the wrestling remains.

This is a post about how much I dislike “moisturizing” my hands.

The softness. That sniveling, supple skin screams “milksop”. Other nettles abound, too. The oily traces of your wandering hands left all over your clothes, computers, stereo, barbels, whiskey bottles, flannel, woman, and other manly things that I frequently touch. The humiliation of going to the store and trying to find a bottle that does not proclaim feminized voluptuousness, nor will leave remnants of what appear to be, to my militarized eyes, radar-reflecting aluminum chaff upon your hands. Try it, I dare you.

I first settled on Aveeno Daily Moisturizing Lotion with Natural Colloidal Oatmeal. Regular bottle shape, no remarkable scent, and a pleasing, affirming, cowboy-approved oatmeal color and composition with no chaff. However, all is not well with my hands upon using Mr. Aveeno Colloidal Oatmeal. Oatmeal, upon slathering, doesn’t immediately merge with the hands. No, instead it sits on top of my skin for hours, reminding me of the henious act I have perpetrated upon my epidermis. In fact, the absorption was so slow that I could only use it at night, in the safety and privacy of my own bedroom. Dark oil stains appeared on anything touched (laptop, phone, keys, car, keyboard (!!!)) for hours after application. If Chuck Norris caught me with the kind of oily hands Mr. Aveeno Colloidal Oatmeal produces, a swift roundhouse would be the only fitting end of for a dermal weakling like me. There had to be something better.

And there was. Well, how about a less compromising product. It even fits nicely inside a brown paper bag. Lubriderm Advanced Therapy Hand Cream. Oh yes. Now we are talking. This stuff goes on like a Miami Vice suspect: nice and easy. It’s thicker, and best of all, Mr. Hand Cream finds those cracked, bleeding scales that compose your winter skin and melts in, never to be seen or smelt again. Aside from the preternatural effects common to products of this type which will be discussed in the next paragraph, there are absolutely no ill or unmanly results from using this product. Instead of Chuck Norris finding fault with me, now I will find fault with Chuck Norris. “Hey, Chuck, why are you grabbing my hands?”

Undoubtedly the worst part of the application of moisturizing lotion upon your hands is the unnatural, eerie smoothness that it brings. My hands are smoother than my butt. My hands are smother than, and don’t even think that I haven’t done an empirical comparison, a baby’s butt. In no other time of the year are my hands as smooth as winter. Dermal weakling. Barely a man. Humiliating.

Excuse me. I need to go put on my overalls and go chop wood. Because, “I’m a lumberjack and I’m o-kay. I work all night and I sleep all day…”

Also, I’m renaming, redesigning & moving the blog soon. “Fiends! I’ll tear them apart!” Probably to here.

“Right! Charge!”

…

…

…

“Run away!”

…

“Oh, haw haw haw haw! Haw! Haw haw heh…”

You may recognize the name; my wife attends the same institution of higher learning. A complete coincidence. Contemporary art historians have no influence in matters of science. WashU was just the closest train stop.

I’ve enjoyed the last two and a half years of earning money, reading whatever the heck I want, not taking tests, puttering around in the evenings, and in general flaunting the non-academic life. At least I get to keep the money.

–Lunch guest today

Now, though, a day after my quadcentennial, I must find myself anew amidst the spray. Time, timeliness, timelessness, all aspects of a shower, require a short periodicty. But the phase must be shifted, as befits my new-found cellular maturity. I, Noel Weichbrodt, have resolved to bath once a day, in the evening.

The best song on the new Root’s album is the last one.

[Link fixed] Can’t Stop This.

I’m resorting to a dialogue. You may call my interlocutor ‘Reader’, or whatever else you fancy.

“What are you doing at work?”

A question with an answer more convoluted than I wish, dear Reader, though by necessity. Broadly speaking, I’m writing software for intelligence agencies. Technically speaking, I’m writing a new enterprise-level intranet application in ASP.NET and C#. Basically the same work as before, with the C# being a slight Java-like twist on my previous language of VB.NET. The kicker for me is that at this new place, being a large defense contractor with dozens of sites at CMMI level 5, there’s a lot of meaty metrics and process optimizations that give my work interesting structure. The requirements often arouse intellectual engagement too. Being a large corporation where my product actually makes the company money (instead of helping the company to run its business better, like my last job), they take care of administrative and configuration work so that I can do what I love: write computer code that makes software.

I’m still developing stories and the narrative for living in our new city, so I’ve been writing really technical drafts for the last weeks. But my displacement pinched my editing skills, so none have seen the light of day.

St. Louis, the Mound City.

Born in Colorado, grown in Oklahoma, proud ex-Texan, and sometimes-proud alumni of Covenant College (B.A. Philosophy, B.A. Information & Computer Science; 2004). My wife, Elissa, and I met on Lookout Mountain, Georgia while at college and were married in the winter of 2004 in her hometown of Honolulu, Hawaii. We just moved to Saint Louis from Chattanooga, Tennessee where I was writing software for the AMLaw 250 law firm Miller & Martin and she was a adjunct professor of English at our alma mater. I have joined the OGS project for TASC STL, and she attends the graduate school at Washington University in the Art History program. We have a 100 year old house in University City, a cat that we compare to Marie Antoinette, a list of restaurants to check out in Saint Louis, and an ever-expanding library of books. I enjoy spending time with my five siblings scattered across from both coasts through the Midwest, listening to live jazz, and practicing soccer tricks copied from Ronaldinho.

Also, there appears to be a commissioned corporate inspirational song and video.

The mountains have been hazy the last week. Today I walked south from downtown to southside, and I could only make out the faintest looming mountain line in the sky two miles away. I picked up my car, clad in new klomppen so freash and so clean clean, and drove away.

My playlist for driving to and fro is as follows:

1. Johnny Cash in Tennessee
1. Live at Fulsom Prison
2. Johnny Cash & Bob Dylan
3. American Recordings
4. American III
5. American IV
2. My Morning Jacket in Kentucky
1. It Still Moves
2. Z
3. Sufjan Stevens in Illinoise
1. Illinoise
2. Avalanche
3. Seven Swans
4. Live at the Purple Door 12/20/2005
4. Nelly in Missouri
1. various singles of irreputable provenance and nature

Obviously, two questions follow from this. First, does anyone know of high-quality MMJ live sets from the Z tour? Second, can a suitable replacement be found for Nelly repping Missouri?

This move is also messing with my personal metanarrative. But I’ll touch on that later.

]]> http://noel.weichbrodt.org/westward-ho/feed/ 1 http://noel.weichbrodt.org/summer-solstice/ http://noel.weichbrodt.org/summer-solstice/#comments Thu, 06 Jul 2006 23:46:16 +0000 noel http://www.noel.weichbrodt.org/summer-solstice/ …was good for Weichbrodts, bad for the Yanks, and sad for Chattanooga. Westward ho.

On the longest day of the year, I verbally accepted a job offer, we put a contract on a house in University City, and the US Men’s National Team lost to Ghana 2-1. It’ll be nice to return to the Midwest.

The World Cup isn’t the only cat that has caught my tongue over the last month.

We’re leaving this town, sadly. Excitingly, I’ve accepted a Junior Programmer position in the IT Intelligence group of a large defense company, and Elissa has been accepted into the doctoral-track graduate program at Washington Univerrsity in St. Louis.

Obviously this wil change…things. Stay tuned.

]]> http://noel.weichbrodt.org/summer-solstice/feed/ 1 http://noel.weichbrodt.org/yellow-card-for-wasting-time/ http://noel.weichbrodt.org/yellow-card-for-wasting-time/#comments Thu, 08 Jun 2006 23:39:35 +0000 noel http://www.noel.weichbrodt.org/yellow-card-for-wasting-time/ This doesn’t really count as a post. Blame it on the World Cup. I have substantial content to reveal to the world, but all my time is being sucked into the bladders of 16 inflatable balls as those 32 teams play each other. “I’m watching the World Cup” doesn’t count as an excuse for not blogging, mostly because I can’t watch something that hasn’t begun (TiVo, if you solve that problem, I will personally beat a trail to your door). But hey, watching requires preperation, and those tatical guides for each group and team don’t read themselves.
]]> http://noel.weichbrodt.org/yellow-card-for-wasting-time/feed/ 0 http://noel.weichbrodt.org/the-man-date/ http://noel.weichbrodt.org/the-man-date/#comments Wed, 31 May 2006 23:37:34 +0000 noel http://www.noel.weichbrodt.org/the-man-date/ When Macey was back in Chattanooga a couple of weeks months ago, we reclaimed some quality time together we both had missed. One moment, a precious hour, of that was lunch. We went to a downtown Thai restaurant. We both had Thai iced tea and something spicy. We talked. It was a man date. I did the same type thing with my younger bro over Christmas.

If you don’t know, now you know. I’m just that secure.

]]> http://noel.weichbrodt.org/the-man-date/feed/ 3 http://noel.weichbrodt.org/lame-excuses/ http://noel.weichbrodt.org/lame-excuses/#comments Tue, 16 May 2006 23:31:08 +0000 noel http://www.noel.weichbrodt.org/lame-excuses/ I was going to post a lame excuse for my recent posts, all of which contain less than two sentences and/or a single picture.

This is not it.

]]> http://noel.weichbrodt.org/lame-excuses/feed/ 0 http://noel.weichbrodt.org/out-to-lunch-back-on-monday/ http://noel.weichbrodt.org/out-to-lunch-back-on-monday/#comments Thu, 06 Apr 2006 17:30:59 +0000 noel http://www.noel.weichbrodt.org/out-to-lunch-back-on-monday/ http://noel.weichbrodt.org/out-to-lunch-back-on-monday/feed/ 0 http://noel.weichbrodt.org/attention-chattanooga/ http://noel.weichbrodt.org/attention-chattanooga/#comments Tue, 28 Mar 2006 04:33:54 +0000 noel http://www.noel.weichbrodt.org/attention-chattanooga/ The man recently praised by Robert Pinsky as showing “ambition and scope”, R. David Macey, will return to our fair town in a mere matter of hours. Mothers, hide your comely daughters, lest his aforementioned scope extend to them. Everyone else, meet at the Fox & the Hound, which has yet again agreed to offer $2.00 pints for the evening in his honor.

Mr. Macey will be taking visitors beginning at four in the afternoon.

For those so inclined, I will arrive there at six in the evening to catch the rebroadcast of the day’s Champion’s League fixture ‘twixt my beloved Barcelona and Benefica with him.

That is all.

]]> http://noel.weichbrodt.org/attention-chattanooga/feed/ 0 http://noel.weichbrodt.org/the-importance-of-bourbon-in-these-uncertain-modern-times/ http://noel.weichbrodt.org/the-importance-of-bourbon-in-these-uncertain-modern-times/#comments Sun, 12 Feb 2006 23:33:21 +0000 noel http://www.noel.weichbrodt.org/the-importance-of-bourbon-in-these-uncertain-modern-times/ Mesh and I recently discussed the wonders and glories, the ineffable qualities that make themselves sparklingly apparent, the virtues that delight and enjoy the reader of the Walker Percy essay on drinking bourbon.

The world is a broken place. Words like his are important to hear and follow in these uncertain, modern times. The consumption of bourbon has become integral in thinking, discussing, and responding to current world events, whether you do so alone or with the companionship of others.

Last night was another miserable experience with scotch, and caused me to long for the bracing, wholesome embrace of a few fingers of Kentucky’s finest. Percy converted me to bourbon with this essay, and damn if I cannot testify that it all isn’t true.

It appears that the University of North Carolina holds the original manuscript, which would be a treat to examine. I’m keeping a copy of the entire essay in the extended entry so that it doesn’t slip away from me again.


This is not written by a connoisseur of Bourbon. Ninety-nine percent of
Bourbon drinkers know more about Bourbon than I do. It is about the
aesthetic of Bourbon drinking in general and in particular of knocking it
back neat.

I can hardly tell one Bourbon from another, unless the other is very bad.
Some bad Boubons are even more memorable than good ones. For example, I
can recall being broke with some friends in Tennessee and deciding to have
a party and being able to afford only two-fifths of a $1.75 Bourbon called
Two Natural, whose label showed dice coming up 5 and 2. Its taste was
memorable. The psychological effect was also notable. After knocking back
two or three shots over a period of half an hour, the three male drinkers
looked at each other and said in a single voice: ‘Where are the women?’
I have not been able to locate this remarkable Bourbon since.

Not only should connoisseurs of Bourbon not read this article, neither
should persons preoccupied with the perils of alcoholism, cirrhosis,
esophageal hemorrhage, cancer of the palate, and so forth–all real dangers.
I, too, deplore these afflications. But, as between these evils and the
aesthetic of Bourbon drinking, that is, the use of Bourbon to warm the
heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold
phlegm of Wednesday afternoons, I choose the aesthetic. What, after all,
is the use of not having cancer, cirrhosis, and such, if a man comes home
from work every day at five-thirty to the exurbs of Montclair or Memphis
and there is the grass growing and the little family looking not quite at
him but just past the side of his head, and there’s Cronkite on the tube
and the smell of pot roast in the living room, and inside the house and
outside in the pretty exurb has settled the noxious particles and the
sadn ess of the old dying Western world, and him thinking: ‘Jesus, is this
it? Listening to Cronkite and the grass growing?’

If I should appear to be suggesting that such a man proceed as quickly as
possible to anesthetize his cerebral cortex by ingesting ethyl alcohol,
the point is being missed. Or part of the point. The joy of Bourbon
drinking is not the pharmacological effect of C(2)H(5)OH on the cortex but
rather the instant of the whiskey being knocked back and the little
explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasopharynx and
the hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime–aesthetic considerations to
which the effect of the alcohol is, if not dispensable, at least secondary.

By contrast, Scotch: for me (not, I presume, for a Scot), drinking Scotch
is like looking at a picture of Noel Coward. The whiskey assaults the
nasopharynx with all the excitement of paregoric. Scotch drinkers (not
all, of course) I think of as upward-mobile Americans, Houston and New
Orleans businessmen who graduate from Bourbon about the same time they shed
seersuckers for Lilly slacks. Of course, by now these same folk may have
gone back to Bourbon and seersucker for the same reason, because too many
Houston oilmen drink Scotch.

Nothing, therefore, will be said about the fine points of sour mash,
straights, blends, bonded, except a general preference for the lower proofs.
It is a matter of the arithmetic of aesthetics. If one derives the same
pleasure from knocking back 80-proof Bourbon as 100-proof, the formula is
both as simple as 2 + 2 = 4 and as incredible as non-Euclidean geometry.
Consider. One knocks back five one-ounce shots of 80-proof Early Times or
four shots of 100-proof Old Fitzgerald. The alcohol ingestion is the same:

5 X 40% = 2
4 X 50% = 2

Yet, in the case of the Early Times, one has obtained an extra quantum of
joy without cost to liver, brain, or gastric mucosa. A bonus, pure and
simple, an aesthetic gain as incredible as two parallel lines meeting at
infinity.

An apology to the reader is in order, nevertheless, for it has just occurred
to me that this is the most unedifying and even maleficent piece I ever
wrote–if it should encourage potential alcoholics to start knocking back
Bourbon neat. It is also the unfairest. Because I am, happily and
unhappily, endowed with a bad GI tract, diverticulosis, neurotic colon,
and a mild recurring nausea, which make it less likely for me to become an
alcoholic than my healthier fellow Americans. I can hear the reader now:
Who is he kidding? If this joker has to knock back five shots of Bourbon
every afternoon just to stand the twentieth century, he’s already an
alcoholic. Very well. I submit to this or any semantic. All I am saying
is that if I drink much more than this I will get sick as a dog for two
days and the very sight and smell of whiskey will bring on the heaves.

Readers beware, therefore, save only those who have stronger wills or as
bad a gut as I.

The pleasure of knocking back Bourbon lies in the plain of the aesthetic
but at an opposite pole from connoisseurship. My preference for the
former is or is not deplorable depending on one’s value system —
that is to say, how one balances out the Epicurean virtues of
cultivating one’s sensory end organs with the greatest discrimination and
at least cost to one’s health, against the virtue of evocation of time and
memory and of the recovery of self and the past from the fogged-in
disoriented Western world. In Kierkegaardian terms, the use of Bourbon to
such an end is a kind of aestheticized religious mode of existence, whereas
connoisseurship, the discriminating but single-minded stimulation of sensory
end organs, is the aesthetic of damnation.

Two exemplars of the two aesthetics come to mind.

Imagine Clifton Webb, scarf at throat, sitting at Cap d’Antibes on a perfect
day, the little wavelets of the Mediterranean sparkling in the sunlight,
and he is savoring a 1959 Mouton Rothschild.

Then imagine William Faulkner, having finished ‘Absalom, Absalom!’,
drained, written out, pissed-off, feeling himself over the edge and out of
it,
nowhere, but he goes somewhere, his favorite hunting place in the Delta
wilderness of the Big Sunflower River and, still feeling bad with his
hunting cronies and maybe even a little phony, which he was, what with him
trying to pretend he was one of them, a farmer, hunkered down in the cold
and rain after the hunt, after honorably passing up the does and seeing no
bucks, shivering and snot-nosed, takes out a flat pint of any Bourbon at
all and flatfoots about a third of it. He shivers again but not from the
cold.

Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.

1926: As a child watching my father in Birmingham, in the exurbs, living
next to a number-6 fairway of the New Country Club, him disdaining both
the bathtub gin and white lightening of the time, aging his own Bourbon in
a charcoal keg, on his hands and knees in the basement sucking on the
siphon, a matter of gravity requiring cheek pressed against the concrete
floor, the siphon getting going, the decanter ready, the first hot spurt
into his mouth not spat out.

1933: My uncle’s sun parlour in the Mississippi Delta and toddies on a
Sunday afternoon, the prolonged and meditative tinkle of silver spoon
against crystal to dissolve the sugar; talk, tinkle, talk; the talk mostly
political: “Roosevelt is doing a good job; no, the son of a bitch is
betraying his class.”

1934: Drinking at a Delta dance, the boys in bi-swing jackets and tab
collars, tough-talking and profane and also scared of the girls and
therefore safe in the men’s room. Somebody passes around bootleg Bourbon
in a Coke bottle. It’s awful. Tears start from eyes, faces turn red.
‘Hot damn, that’s good!’

1935: Drinking at a football game in college. UNC versus Duke. One has a
blind date. One is lucky. She is beautiful. Her clothes are the color of
the fall leaves and her face turns up like a flower. But what to SAY to
her, let alone what to do, and whether she is ‘nice’ or ‘hot’ — a
distinction made in those days. But what to SAY? Take a drink, by now
from a proper concave hip flask (a long way from the Delta Coke bottle)
with a hinged top. Will she have a drink? No. But that’s all right. The
taste of the Bourbon (Cream of Kentucky) and the smell of her fuse with
the brilliant Carolina fall and the sounds of the crowd and the hit of the
linesmen in a single synesthesia.

1941: Drinking mint juleps, famed Southern Bourbon drink, though in the
Deep South not really drunk much. In fact, they are drunk so seldom that
when, say, on Derby Day somebody gives a julep party, people drink them
like cocktails, forgetting that a good julep holds at least five ounces of
Bourbon. Men fall face-down unconscious, women wander in the woods
disconsolate and amnesiac, full of thoughts of Kahil Gibran and the
limberlost.

Would you believe the first mind julep I had I was sitting not on a columned
porth but in the Boo Snooker bar of the New Yorker Hotel with a Bellevue
nurse in 1941? The nurse, a nice upstate girl, head floor nurse, brisk,
swift, good-looking; Bellevue nurses, the best in the world and this one
the best of Bellevue, at least the best-looking. The julep, an atrocity,
a heavy syrupy Bourbon and water in a small glass clotted with ice. But
good!

How could two women be more different than the beautiful languid Carolina
girl and this swift handsome girl from Utica, best Dutch stock? One thing
was sure. Each has to be courted, loved, drunk with, with Bourbon. I
should have stuck with the Bourbon. We changed to gin fizzes because the
bartender said he came from New Orleans and could make good ones. He could
and did.

They were delicious. What I didn’t know was that they were made with raw
egg albumen and I was allergic to it. What a lovely fine strapping smart
girl!

And thinking of being invited into her apartment where she lived alone and
of her offering to cook a little supper and of the many kisses and the
sweet love that already existed between us and was bound to grow apace,
when on the Brooklyn Bridge itself my upper lip began to swell and little
sparks of light flew past the corner of my eye like St. Elmo’s fire. In
the space of thirty seconds my lip stuck out a full three-quarter inch,
like a shelf, like Mortimer Snerd. Not only was kissing out of the question
but my eyes swelled shut. I made it across the bridge, pulled over to the
curb, and fainted. Whereupon this noble nurse drove me back to Bellevue,
game me a shot, and put me to bed.

Anybody who monkeys around with gin and egg white deserves what he gets.
I should have stuck with Bourbon and have from that day to this.

POSTSCRIPT: Reader, just in case you don’t want to knock it back straight
and would rather monkey around with perfectly good Bourbon, here’s my
favorite recipe, “Cud’n Walker’s Uncle Will’s Favorite Mint Julep Receipt.”

You need excellent Bourbon whiskey; rye or Scotch will not do. Put half
an inch of sugar in the bottom of the glass and merely dampen it with water.
Next, very quickly–and here is the trick in the procedure — crush your
ice, actually powder it, preferably with a wooden mallet, so quickly that
it remains dry, and, slipping two sprigs of fresh mint against the inside
of the glass, cram the ice in right to the brim, packing it with your hand.
Finally, fill the glass, which apparently has no room left for anything
else, with Bourbon, the older the better, and grate a bit of nutmeg on the
top. The glass will frost immediately. Then settle back in your chair
for half an hour of cumulative bliss.

–Walker Pearcy, “Bourbon”, from Signposts in a Strange Land, 1975

]]> http://noel.weichbrodt.org/the-importance-of-bourbon-in-these-uncertain-modern-times/feed/ 3 http://noel.weichbrodt.org/sooner-gain-gamecock-lost/ http://noel.weichbrodt.org/sooner-gain-gamecock-lost/#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2006 23:35:05 +0000 noel http://www.noel.weichbrodt.org/sooner-gain-gamecock-lost/ Win some and lose some. This week I said Godspeed to a dear friend of many years, Jason Luther. He’s moving to Florida to pursue ludicrous amounts of insurance money his dream of running his own business. Meyer’s Pride, a roofing contractor in partnership with our old roommate Brien Meyer, gains his singular work ethic and intelligence. Brien gets his old roommate back, and Chattanooga loses one more of my valued friends that I have gained since moving here. Jason, though I rocked your world in Greco-Roman, you’ve been a greater influence, resource, and brother than your wrestling performance suggested.

I mentioned that you win some. If you’ve ever been foiled by Murray Logic, curious about the Gamecocks, or craving some young conservative opinion-shaping, you would do well to subscribe, as I already have, to Manville Tabletalk, Jason’s new blog. Though I’ll miss him as a drinking buddy, at least I’ll still get the quips and absurd videos.

]]> http://noel.weichbrodt.org/sooner-gain-gamecock-lost/feed/ 1 http://noel.weichbrodt.org/think-small-think-sexy-beast/ http://noel.weichbrodt.org/think-small-think-sexy-beast/#comments Tue, 10 Jan 2006 23:36:02 +0000 noel http://www.noel.weichbrodt.org/think-small-think-sexy-beast/ When confronting massive problems like African poverty, try this debonair gentlemen on for size.

My friend Peter Brinkerhoff (he of S.B. infamy) is back in America for a small break after a year in the (neither) Democratic (nor) Republic of Congo. He’s doing important work on a small scale, work that won’t win him Fulbright Fellowships or Time magazine covers, but will help lift ~1,000 Congolese from cyclical poverty to thriving entrepreneurship. Joel Belz describes the work of his fellow Ashvillian in glowing terms in a post to World Magazine.

I’m working on getting Peter set up with a blog. More to follow. Props to Jason for proposing the title and lead of this post.

]]> http://noel.weichbrodt.org/think-small-think-sexy-beast/feed/ 1