On May 1, 1979, seventeen capuchin monkeys escaped from a lab in Morehouse Parish, Louisiana. The monkeys thrived, and there are now an estimated 10,000 capuchins living in Felsenthal National Wildlife Refuge in southern Arkansas.
Speaking of freakin’ enormous storm surges: My brother-in-law, skiving off architecture school by building actual houses for actual people who actually need them at the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio in Biloxi, sent up a Mardi Gras care package that included several bottles of Lazy Magnolia Southern Pecan ale.
On the one hand, I want to swear that I shun beers that contain ingredients other than water, malt, hops and yeast. On the other hand, my favorite beer for years has been Spotted Cow from New Glarus Brewing Company, which is amended with corn. Still, I took one look at this pecan beer and thought, “candy beer,” but ended up wrong. Whatever they’ve got going on there, it’s subtle. It winds up being very nicely balanced: malty, toasty. I never would have picked out the rogue nut esters. Crazy delicious.
I finished drafting my allotted second-and-a-halfth scene late this afternoon, and then set out to use our newly-built fire pit to make a wood-fired pollo alla diavola similar to the one described in Cucina & Famiglia, a charming and useful cookbook co-written by Stanley Tucci’s mom. The diavola is supposed to refer to pepper and not to chicken-charring flames from hell. I knew this, but had to re-learn it the hard way.
I went into today thinking that the scene-drafting was going to be hard and the troll-editing was going to be easy, but I was wrong. Evidently the step between first draft and next draft is a doozy. I will now go and open a bottle of beer (homebrew, but more on that later.)