Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Rum 101

It’s Rum Friday and you’re thinking, “I want to participate but I have no idea what kind of rum to buy.” Luckily for you, I’ve been doing a lot of research.

History and Varieties
Rum originated on sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean in the 17th century. The molasses left over after refining sugar was fermented and distilled. As the Europeans came over to the Americas, rum quickly gained popularity. In fact, the saying “no taxation without representation” started from a tax on rum, not tea as many people think. Technically the tax was on the molasses used to make rum. The English wanted the colonists to buy the inferior English molasses so they heavily taxed the Caribbean molasses and really got the colonists riled up.  The “no taxation without representation” slogan flew above many rum distilleries as they ignored this tax and continued to use Caribbean molasses. In those days, rum was often drank as part of a punch.

Today there are a variety of rums:

  • Light (silver/white): Mostly used in cocktails and often on the lower end of the price scale.
  • Gold: They’re aged in wooden barrels to get the color. Sometimes the barrels were previously used for whiskey.
  • Dark: These rums are aged longer in the wooden barrels and have stronger flavors than light or gold rums.
  • Spiced: Usually based on gold rums, these have spices added to them.
  • Flavored: You can find rums flavored with a variety of fruits and they’re most often used in mixed drinks.

Rum and Coke
The easiest rum drink is a Rum and Coke. I use Coke Zero but I’ve known other people to use regular Coke, Diet Coke, or even a cherry version. You can use a variety of rums in your coke but Baccardi silver and Captain Morgan’s spiced rums are probably the two you’ll find most often in the bar. I’ve really been enjoying Black Kraken spiced rum in my Coke Zero lately. Mount Gay Eclipse is another good one with coke.

Rum Punch
Rum punch is a great drink as well and there are lots of good recipes. Here’s an easy one called a “Painkiller” that we enjoyed down in St. Thomas.

2 Parts Pineapple Juice
1 Part Coco Lopez Coconut
1 Part Orange Juice
Lots of RUM!

Want to get a little more fancy with your rum punch? I got this recipe from someone who grew up in the Caribbean and it was a big hit at recent party in our house.

1 Part fresh squeezed lime juice
2 Parts brown sugar dissolved in a little hot water
3 Parts quality dark rum
4 Parts cold water
You can get fancy and add freshly grated nutmeg after pouring too

Straight Rum
If you have a good rum, you can just drink it straight. Of all the rums I’ve tried, Mount Gay makes some of my favorites. Started in 1703, it’s the world’s first and oldest rum distillery. They have five different rums spanning the gamut of prices and types, but if you’re drinking it straight, go for Mount Gay Extra Old. Whiskey stones are a good addition to cool the drink without watering it down. If you’re more of a whiskey/scotch drinker, check out the Mount Gay 1703 Old Cask Selection.

A couple other excellent choices:

Rum Cake
And finally, rum is also used in a lot of cooking. For example, here’s a fantastic rum cake recipe:

Ingredients

  • 1 box Duncan Hines Classic White cake mix
  • 1 small box instant vanilla pudding
  • 1/2 cup Wesson Oil
  • 1/2 cup water
  • 1/2 cup light rum
  • 4 eggs

Directions

Combine everything but the eggs ’til moist. Then add eggs one at a time and beat for 2 minutes. Bake at 350 for 50-55 min in a bundt pan that has been greased and floured. Take out of oven to cool and make the glaze.

Glaze Ingredients/Directions

Combine in saucepan over low heat

  • 1 stick of butter
  • 1/8 – 1/4 cup water
  • 1/2 – 3/4 cup sugar
  • Bring to a boil (stir a couple of times) and let it boil for about a minute. Remove from the heat and add
  • 1/4 cup light rum

Stir. And pour on cake. (see below)

Use a fork and poke some holes around the bottom of the rum cake (really what is on top in the pan) and slide a knife around the edges of cake to loosen it and allow room for glaze to get on the sides. Pour warm glaze over the partially cooled rum cake. Let it sit for about 5 minutes then remove the cake onto a cooling rack. It’s important to do this while the cake is still a little warm so it comes out… but not too warm or else it will break.

So there you have it. Head down to the liquor store and start experimenting with rum! I don’t think I’ve even tried a quarter of the rums that Total Wine has on their shelves. There’s bound to be one that’s exactly what you’re looking for. And if you find one you don’t like, bring it over to my house and I’ll dispose of it for you.

benmartens March 22, 2013 Commentary, Food

Trap Shooting

I picked up a copy of Breaking Clays: Target, Tactics, Tips and Techniques by Chris Batha in hopes that it would help with my trap shooting. The first half of the book is an introduction to shotgun sports while the second half covers the various sports and doesn’t spend a lot of time specifically on trap. I did get a few good tips though which are shown below:

  • When you miss, it has little to do with the ballistics of the shotgun – choke and cartridges give you inches where you miss in feet. A miss is more often caused by a breakdown in the fundamentals.
  • If you can keep the muzzles on the line throughout the shot, you limit your misses to in front or behind. You instantly achieve a fifty per cent reduction in missing. You also gain a significant second benefit. As a competitor, if you miss, you need to know the fault or the cause and understand the correction. If you can stay on the line, it becomes easier to recognise the fault. You miss either in front or behind, now you can analyse the cause and apply the correction. You can improve the odds even more. You can make sure that if you do miss, it is in front of the target.
  • Raise your eyebrows just before you call for the target. This simple action gives you a twenty per cent increase in light-gathering vision.
  • Clay target shooting is different from other sports in that there is little physical activity to relieve stress build-up which increases incrementally as scores increase.
  • The inability to suppress left brain activity is what leads to ‘choking’.
  • My approach is, they are all one-bird competitions. You should take each target one at time. See the target – break the target. Concentrate on each shot as an independent and all-important target and forget about everything else…especially your score!
  • There is no such person as The Natural. I will allow that there are a few participants in any walk of life who can learn a motor skill quicker than the average person. But there is still a ceiling to their progress – they just reach it quicker. The learning curve of any activity is never a straight line; it consists of peaks and troughs and very often long plateaus of little progress.

The book also taught me where the term “trap shooting” comes from. It started in England when they would place a bird on the ground and cover it with a box. You would move the box, pick up your gun, and shoot the fleeing bird. When people got too good at that, they attached a string to the box and moved farther back. When the sport came to America there was a shortage of pigeons and doves so they switched to the clays instead. In the 1920s, England made it illegal to use live birds in trap shooting.

benmartens March 21, 2013 Books, Sports

Book Quotes

One of the best features of the Kindle is the ability to highlight passages and then retrieve them on your computer later. Here are some of the passages I’ve highlighted in the last few months:

  • ATLANTIS by Bob Mayer
    More missions meant they were better at what they did, not less afraid.
  • The Time Machine by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
    I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours—that is another matter.
  • The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle
    Nitwit ideas are for emergencies. You use them when you’ve got nothing else to try. If they work, they go in the Book. Otherwise you follow the Book, which is largely a collection of nitwit ideas that worked."

I’d say Mote in God’s Eye is the best of the books I’ve read recently. I’ve been very impressed with two of the Jerry Pournelle books I’ve read. The other is Lucifer’s Hammer. If you’re at all interested by the synopsis of the books, give them a shot and you probably won’t be disappointed.

benmartens March 20, 2013 Books

Remote Control For Church

Somehow I’ve turned into the A/V geek at church. We have a modest setup cobbled together from various donations throughout the years. The problem was that our equipment is up in the balcony so I had to go up there at various points in the service to adjust speaker levels and start/stop the DVD recording. That technically worked fine but was annoying to those who sat around me as I would be coming and going from my seat throughout the service. Here’s the plan that I laid out and recently completed:

1) The first step was to rip out all of the connections and start over. The existing setup was a mishmash of tiny improvements from a half dozen people. Our mixer is a Mackie 1202-VLZ so I dug up the manual and read it cover to cover. The device was capable of a lot more than we were using it for. I rewired everything (removing two unneeded components in the process) and let it sit for a few services to make sure everything was working. That was a huge improvement in itself because now I can sit up there with headphones to individually check any microphone without affecting the output and see the output meter display lights bounce so I know that the proper levels are going to our DVD recorder.

2) The amp we were using was very old and had no remote control. I swapped this out for a newer (but still used) amp that was previously powering the theater room at our house. In addition to having a remote, it also has a display that shows the current volume level. Now I’ve figured out that “42” is the magic number for the volume with an average congregation size.

3) With those pieces in place, I purchased an RF (radio frequency) remote. Normal remotes are IR (infrared) and need to be pointed directly at the receiver. RF radiates in all directions from the remote and even goes through walls. The signals are captured by an RF receiver and translated into IR that the various A/V components can understand. I programmed the remote for five basic functions: volume up, volume down, mute, DVD record, and DVD stop. I can’t adjust individual levels on the various mics, but I can make sure that if there’s a particular noisy child, I can crank up the speakers a little more to compensate. If we’re ever doing a nicer recording like when the choir sings we’ll still need someone up in the balcony to check the levels, but for most services, the remote will work fine.

I tried the whole thing out for the first time last week. Tim kept laughing at me because every time I looked over I had a goofy grin on my face. I couldn’t get over the fact after months of off-and-on work, I was now sitting in a church pew with a remote control! I’ll give this a few weeks to make sure I’m happy with the setup and then I’ll start training the ushers how to do it so I can completely remove myself from the equation.

benmartens March 19, 2013 Geek

2013 March Madness Bracket

The NCAA tournament starts this week! The teams have been picked and it’s time to pick your brackets. This is an annual tradition on Studio711 and if you’ve never participated, consider giving it a shot this year. Everyone should play even if you’ve never watched a basketball game in your life.

  1. Go to http://y.ahoo.it/bFwqMbhJ and join the group. The password is my first name in all lower-case. There’s no cost. (I recommend that you pick a team name that somehow uses your name so we know who you are. For example, mine is “Ben’s Busted Bracket.” But of course, you don’t have to use your name in the team name. Pick whatever you want!)
  2. Fill out your bracket by guessing which team will win each game. The little numbers beside the school’s name is the ranking in the tournament. So if a #1 team is playing a #16 team, the #1 team will almost always win. Who will win in a game between #8 and #9? Nobody knows! That’s what makes it fun.
  3. Make sure you save your bracket and then you’re done! Come back to this site throughout the next few weeks until the tournament is done and I’ll have a few posts along the way talking about our brackets and who is doing well.

And remember that in addition to TV coverage, you can watch every game live and recorded at http://www.ncaa.com/march-madness.

Good luck! Let’s see if Logan can defend his title this year.

benmartens March 18, 2013 Fantasy Sports

Inexpensive Glasses

Is it just me or have glasses gotten crazy expensive? They lure you in with the price of the frames, then add a half dozen coatings and gimmicks to the lenses, and suddenly those glasses cost more than your monthly car payment.

I’ve heard enough people talking about warbyparker.com that I’m going to give them a serious look the next time I buy glasses. Here’s their concept in their own words

Warby Parker was conceived as an alternative to the overpriced and bland eyewear available today. Prescription eyewear simply should not cost $300+. The industry is controlled by a few large companies that have kept prices artificially high, reaping huge profits from consumers who have no other options. By circumventing traditional channels and engaging with customers directly through our website, Warby Parker is able to provide higher-quality, better-looking prescription eyewear at a fraction of the price.

If you don’t live in a place that has a showroom, there are a couple tools available. You can upload a picture of your face and then see the frames on your face. Once you get your choices narrowed down a bit more, they’ll send you a sample of the various frames which you then mail back. Additionally, for every pair of glasses you buy, Warby Parker will donate a pair to charity.

It seems like a great company that is producing some quality products, and I’m eager to give them a try.

benmartens March 15, 2013 Commentary

Made in America (?)

Tyla’s parents recently got a new car so as we chatted about our purchases, we briefly discussed them being “made in America.” They bought a Chevy and we bought a Ford, so they’re both made in America, right? But what does that even mean? Is it made in America if the company is headquartered here, if the car is assembled here, of if the parts are sourced from the US? I decided to do some research.

ABCNews.com lets you look up the percentage of parts in your car that were made in the US. (It’s a bit vague though and I can’t even tell what model year it references.) The Chevy Captiva that Tyla’s parents bought comes in at 26% while the Escape says 65%. So clearly the badge on the car doesn’t indicate where the parts come from.

Cars.com has an American-Made Index that “highlights the cars that are built here, have the highest amount of domestic parts, and are bought in the largest numbers by Americans.” 2011 is the most recent data I could find, but in that year, the #1 car on their list was the Toyota Camry. Number two was the F150 which has historically done very well in most years of their study. The amount of “American-ness” of a vehicle can vary from year to year as new sources are found for parts or production lines to decrease costs. For example, in 2010, the Ford Escape was #3 on the cars.com list but in 2011, it didn’t make the top 10.

Some websites say that assembly is a good place to look for how much of the money ends up in America. So by that mark my Subaru Impreza is a good buy because it’s assembled in Lafayette, IN. But if you look it up on ABCNews it contains 0% American parts!

In all my research, I didn’t find any cars that were assembled 100% in the USA with 100% American parts by a company headquartered in this country. Cars are a great example of multi-national corporations sourcing materials and labor from around the world to bring you a product. Using country of origin as your top priority when buying a car is going to make your life difficult.

If you want to buy stuff that’s made in America, it’s a lot easier to start with things that have fewer components. Something like a car is just too difficult to figure out these days.

benmartens March 14, 2013 Commentary

Amazon Instant Video

Tyla and I dropped Netflix streaming when they split the subscription from the discs. We’re among the minority that prefers discs though that won’t be the case forever. In the mean time, I’ve been enjoying the selection of streaming videos available for free on Amazon to anyone with a Prime membership. If you’re a Prime member, make sure you check this out! The quality is great, there’s an app on the Xbox360, and the selection is not too shabby. I’ve been using it to watch Top Gear (the UK version) and a couple other TV series.

I’ve kind of expected to pick Netflix back up when our son starts watching some shows, but Amazon is really making a strong push into kid shows too. Engadget ran a story recently about some exclusive children’s programming.

Discs will be around “forever” but it’s not hard to predict that this streaming thing is going to be the way we receive a lot of our content in the future. The big blockbuster shows and movies aren’t there in enough quantity yet to turn the tide, but we’re getting there.

benmartens March 13, 2013 Geek

History Channel’s “The Bible”

The second episode of the History Channel mini-series “The Bible” has now aired. Tyla and I watched the first one and are about halfway through the second. I heard quite a few discussions leading up to it wondering how accurate it would be, and expectations were pretty low. But after 3 hours of the show, I’ll say that I’m fairly impressed.

Sure it’s not 100% accurate. There are some small embellishments here and there and they do expand some short sentences in the Bible to multi-minute scenes, but overall I’m impressed. I’ve had quite a few thoughts as I watched it:

  • The show has raised countless questions in my head as I empathize a bit more with the participants or think in a different way about stories I’ve heard hundreds of times before. What did it feel like for Noah as all the people he knew were clamoring to get into the ark after the door shut? How willing was Lot to help the angels or Rahab to help the spies? These types of questions have sparked some good conversations on our couch.
  • The Bible is violent. Too often I pull up the Sunday school version of a story when I hear it, but in reality it was much more gruesome and intense.
  • There’s so much that is left out of the show, but they’re trying to cover the entire Bible in 10 hours (including commercials.)

When you read the Bible, there’s a strong theme throughout the Old Testament showing how God was directing it all to send Jesus to die and save us. That theme hasn’t come through very well in the show. That’s probably the biggest negative. They’re shooting the mini-series using the Bible as pure history book with very little religion. While it’s true that the Bible is an excellent historical record, it’s so much more than that.

So far, I’d call this an easy win. For believers, I’d say most of us are enjoying watching the director’s take on the Bible. And surely there are at least a couple people out there that are going to think twice after seeing this and dig into the Bible a bit deeper. They’ll come up with more questions and hopefully they’ll head to a church for some answers.

benmartens March 12, 2013 Commentary

Jay’s Cliff

When Jay was out here, we were poking around in Morning Glory Bowl at Crystal. I haven’t spent much time back there and wasn’t a very good guide. We ended up on top of a cliff. I hiked out and came down the easy way but Jay decided to make his way down. Unfortunately he was facing the wrong way, decided to unclick from his skis to turn around, and … well… that’s where the video starts. Thanks to Jay for giving me the thumbs up to post this video. I originally held off because I feel a bit bad for doing nothing but laugh at him, especially since this was partially intentional. My fall the day before was quite a bit worse and was completely unintentional. And at the end of that one he collected my gear and brought it down to me. When he fell, I was already down the hill and just watched him hike back up. I’m such a good friend.

On the way home, Jay realized that he didn’t have his phone. Using my phone, we pulled up the “Find My iPhone” page and the GPS said it was sitting at the bottom of this cliff. Luckily it still had enough juice that he could erase it remotely. Maybe we’ll have to hike this area in the summer and see if we can find it but the odds seem pretty low.

benmartens March 11, 2013 Skiing, Video