Happy Halloween

The owl cookie says: "Give a hoot, don't pollute!"

Oh wait, he does say that, but he also says:
"Happy Halloween!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

It's The Great Pumpkin Ale Taste Test, Charlie Brown

If you've been around here long enough, you know that I love all things pumpkin. Ice cream, muffins, donuts, cereal and BEER! This year I found some new pumpkin beers to try, and I decided to see which one I liked best. So, in honor of the Halloween, I present my pumpkin ale taste test.


Jack's Pumpkin Spice Ale (Anheuser Busch)

Well, Jack's certainly takes the prize for the fruitiest label. But what I really care about is the taste. This beer should be called Cinnamon Ale. That's the only flavor I could identify in it.

Score: (on a scale of 1 to 5) 2 pumpkins

Blue Moon Pumpkin Ale (Coors)

This one tastes the most like pumpkin pie. It also is the only one of these where I could really taste the malt. There was a slight taste of cinnamon, some nutmeg, and a hint of pumpkin. It's on the darker side, making it seem more substantial than some of the others. Overall pretty good.

Score: 4.5 pumpkins

Buffalo Bill's Pumpkin Ale

Cinnamon ale part 2, electric boogaloo. Again, this beer mostly just had a cinnamon flavor. Basically this tasted like "Dentyne gum" beer.

Score: 1 pumpkin

Dogfish Head Punkin Ale

Not much pumpkin flavor in this one. I did detect cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice as the label claims. Maybe a hint of brown sugar. It's not bad, but in my opinion it's an example of the fact that sometimes you don't get what you pay for. This stuff was $9 for a 4 pack! Maybe that made my expectations too high.

Score: 3 pumpkins

The Shipyard Pumpkinhead Ale




The first time I tasted this is seemed kind of sour. However, that initial bite soon settles into a nice pumpkin taste. This one had the best pumpkin flavor and aroma. Very little spice flavor. If Blue Moon is the most like pumpkin pie, then Shipyard is the most like a pumpkin.

Score: 4 pumpkins

So, the winner is Blue Moon Pumpkin Ale, with Shipyard close behind.

Fair Park

I totally forgot about the time change this morning. I got up an hour early and didn't know it until I turned on my computer. No extra hour for me!

Word to the wise: don't wait 5 years to defrag your hard drive. Unless you have about 6 hours to kill.

There's this billboard on the south side of town that used to say "Shop Naked!". Now it's been changed to "Shop Happy". Ignoring for the moment that maybe these two things are the same, are people that f'in Puritan that the word "naked" can't even be seen in public anymore? It's not like this was a work of art or anything, and I couldn't give two shits about what they were advertising, but man people are just too easily offended these days. Idiots.

Now, on to more Fair pictures, these are mostly of the buildings around Fair Park. Most of the buildings were built for the 1936 Texas Centennial Expo. There is some really cool art deco stuff there.

There are lots of really cool old murals on the buildings.

Some of them have recently been repainted.

The guy who holds the Guinness record for tallest house of cards built a replica of the Dallas skyline during the Fair. Apparently he knocked it over with a leaf blower at the end of the last day.

Like Buttah

Updates: No date with POI2 this weekend. She's "busy". Uh oh. I'm not hitting the panic button yet. If we don't go out next weekend, then I'll hit the panic button.

Key Lime Pie: I made one using the recipe from Food Network. I liked it better than the other recipe I used. It has 2/3 cup of lime juice instead of 1/2 cup, so it has more "flava". Thanks Anne!

OK, back to Fair pictures. There was a bit of a Marilyn Monroe theme to the Fair this year.

This is the famous butter sculpture. It's a recreation of the iconic scene from "The Seven Year Itch".

When you got within about 10 feet of this room, you were hit by an overpowering butter smell.

They keep the room at 40 something degrees so the butter doesn't melt.

I wonder if they ate it when the Fair was over.

You know, get a few Ritz crackers, just slide them along Marilyn's arm.

Or just bite off a big hunk.

And it is real butter, not margarine.

Maybe they just let it melt, and everything gets all Raiders of the Lost Ark and shit.

There was a Marilyn Monroe exhibit in one of the museums. They had an impersonator inside and you could get your picture made with her. I wanted to do that so badly, but I felt weird about giving some stranger my camera to take a picture of me. It was hard to get a picture of her without standing in line because she was about halfway up this staircase, and the half that she wasn't on had people walking up and down it.

Yep, that guy's looking up her skirt.

There was this Japanese man who set up his camera on a tripod and then took a picture of his girlfriend looking up Marilyn's skirt. Then she took a picture of him doing the same. They did it really fast, so I wasn't able to get a shot of the girlfriend looking up, but here's the guy. And for the record she was wearing underwear. Don't ask me how I know.

Fuzzy Wittle Animals

What would a fair be without animals? An animal-free fair I suppose. But this one had animals.

Baby giraffe

Baby goats, AKA "kids"

Ostrich

Someone needs to milk this kangaroo, stat!

Oh my Gah, it has legs coming out of its stomach!

Oh wait, it's a baby kangaroo!

Eh, he's kind of cute. I guess.

I wonder how you go about training your dog to do this?



I always wanted a frisbee dog. I tried to teach the dogs I had growing up to catch frisbees, but they would just watch it land.





Doing a backflip