Ho ho hobot.

It's the holiday time of year again. Vacuously True is going to take a break to take care of some important holiday mirth spreading. Look forward to more inane garbage next year.

Tech Speculation III-ish

I know when I started this series I had three technologies in mind… for the life of me I can’t remember what the third one was. I’m taking that as a sign that it probably wasn’t an important trend.

So instead I’ll submit a rant about digital cameras in its place. I’ll try and format that rant so it feels like an extension of the technology speculation series.

At some point digital camera manufactures are going to have to face a grim realization. Increasing the number of mega pixels a camera can capture is going to result into no perceived value for the end user. There should be some point when having a bazillion pixels and having a bazillion and one pixels makes no difference to the user. It may be possible to construct an argument that we’re already there.

I think that once manufactures accept that the race to have the most megapixels is over the first chapter in the book of digital camera development will be finished. Since their introduction digital cameras have been striving to reach parity with their film camera cousins. Film cameras set the standard of what a camera should be and digital cameras did their best to live up to that standard. Film cameras captured more detail than digital cameras so digital cameras kept increasing their pixel counts. I think now we are close to the point of parity (whether we’ve passed it or not I’m not sure). Can anyone successfully inspect a picture and be 100% sure that it was taken with a film camera?

Now it is time for digital cameras to surpass their analog forbearers and do things that film cameras simply cannot. They will expand the definition of what a camera can do. Here are a few features that I look forward to in future generations of digital cameras. Some of these features have already started to appear in one form or another.

GPS enabled cameras. I remember back when having a camera that could do a date/time stamp was a cool thing. Sure it marred the corner of the photo, but at least you’d know which Christmas the photo was taken at. Digital cameras fixed the corner marring issue by simply encoding the date and time in the photo’s metadata. Now I want my digital camera to have a built in GPS so it can not only record when the photo was taken but where it was taken. Besides simply being cool, this will give us another way to sort our photos, geographically in addition to chronologically. Think of how powerful of a search tool that is. As things get further back in your memory which is easier to recall, the exact date something took place or the location it took place? Combining the two you should be able to construct a pretty tight set of candidate results.

I want my digital camera to have wireless connectivity. There are a bunch of different media card standards (compact flash, SD, SmartMedia, MMC, Memory Stick, etc) and it shouldn’t matter which one of those the computer I’m currently at does or does not support. The camera should support Bluetooth or similar technology and simply be able to connect to the computer wirelessly (I don’t want to have to carry around extra cables) and make my photos available. I suppose the reason this isn’t more common is the fact that due to the increased number of megapixels a single photo is often a couple of megabytes. I guess we need to wait for a wireless Bluetooth-like standard that can move a serious amount of data around.

I want magnetic induction charging. This goes for all gadgets, not just cameras. For years I’ve kept my electric toothbrush on my bathroom counter on its little stand. While it sits there it charges itself up. I don’t need a special cable; I don’t have to plug it in. Why aren’t all my gadgets charged thusly? A camera (or any gadget) should be able to sit on a little pad that keeps its battery topped off. Then when I pick it up it should have a full charge and be ready to go. I dream of a day when you just place your gadgets on a table or in the console of your car and they call start charging automatically and wirelessly.

Technology Speculation II – The Surface

The next technology that I really like is surface computing. Microsoft unveiled the Microsoft Surface computer platform earlier this year. Basically, it was a computer built into a coffee table with a multi-touch touch-screen on the top (multi-touch means more than one finger, or object, can be providing input at once). The multi-touch screen on the current, which is to say first, generation of Surface computers is accomplished via cameras inside the table that watch the surface instead of standard pressure sensitivity. The advantage of visually identifying where things are on a touch the screen instead of feeling them via pressure is that in addition to sensing where the object is, the computer might be able to read an identifying label on the object to know what is. This opens up some interesting possibilities.

Why should I care about a table computer? The reason I dig this technology is it offers the possibility of redefining how we interact with computers. The traditional computer interaction paradigm is for you to sit down at a computer. The monitor is your window into the computer’s world. You are given a keyboard and mouse with which you may interact and manipulate things in your window to the computer’s world. Don’t get me wrong, the system works great, but anyone who has helped a computer illiterate person try and use a computer may appreciate how non-intuitive this paradigm can be.

The surface computer can certainly operate using the traditional paradigm, after all, it’s basically a big table sized monitor. But it offers something more. The surface computer offers a new paradigm that I think can be more intuitive than the old one. The surface computer can act as a magic surface that reveals the secret nature of object placed on it.

For instance, say you place your cell phone on the table. If the surface computer can recognize the object is a cell phone (say through a barcode sticker or RFID chip) then it can attempt to communicate with the cell phone (say through bluetooth). Once the surface computer has connected to the phone it could do a couple of interesting things. It could show you all the contact information on your phone or perhaps have all the pictures you’ve taken on your phone spill out onto the table so that you can sort and organize them. The interaction is basically you place a finger on a picture and drag is where you want it on the surface. By placing two fingers on the picture you can scale or rotate it around. These are more intuitive ways to manipulate objects then trying to figure out how to get a mouse to tell the computer what you want to do. If second or third person placed their phones on the table the contents of their phones would also be revealed and you could start swapping contact info or photos simply by dragging them around the surface and back onto the phone you want them to go on.

You can abstract the phone concept to any electric gadget. I think having the contents of the gadget revealed is a powerful concept. Even more powerful is the basic concept that you’re taking something real and tactile and placing it on the surface to reveal something hidden about it. Let’s think about uses for non-gadgets. Let’s pretend there is some sort of labeling system for items in your pantry. Every time you place an item on your surface it knows what you placed on the surface and reads meta-data associated with it. If you place a can on the surface it may notice that the contents are expired and then draw a big red ring around the can to warn you. Perhaps you place a handful of ingredients on the surface and it starts to recommend dishes you can make using the available ingredients. In this case you really are indirectly interacting with a computer. You’re just moving stuff around your kitchen and gleaning a little extra information that is being provided to you by a computer. Nifty.

Of course, you’re not likely to see a surface computer in your house anytime soon, they’re still pretty expensive. Microsoft is initially pitching them for use in hotels and restaurants or any place where a large interactive communal screen would be handy (of course my line of thought is where is a large interactive screen not handy). The idea is they could be used to show you the menu at a fancy restaurant and you’d be able to order drinks or food directly on the surface of your table. While you’re waiting for your drinks and food the table could show you advertisements or some sort of entertaining content.

Once the cost of technology comes down I expect this concept to take root. The ability to interact with real tactile objects and at the same time interact with their meta-data is a powerful one. I haven’t even started to discuss the promise of board games on a surface computer. The computer could take care of random board construction and enforce rules and scoring without sacrificing the tactile joys of table top gaming. That’s something I’m looking forward to quite a bit.

The Future of ink!

I thought it might be fun to speculate about future technological trends. I mean, obviously it sounds fun; let’s see if I’m any good at it. I’ll share a few technologies that I think are interesting but are still in the early stages of development. Presumably, if I’m right, you’ll see these technologies hit the mainstream in a few years. I suggest that you bookmark this post and set a reminder to check the page in about five years to see if I was even close.

[Originally I was going to try and highlight three technologies in this post…but I find that I blab too much and don’t feel that I can share my excitement in such a concise manner. This may be a multi-part series of blogs.]

E-ink. Ok, this is a safe bet. “E-ink” may not yet be a household term, but this technology is already starting to be incorporated into gadgets. Have you heard of the new Amazon Kindle, the electronic reader? That uses E-ink (Sony also has an Ebook based on the technology). So what I’m speculating here is that E-ink will aggressively expand and replace a significant portion of the non-TV/non-primary computer screen LCD market in the future.

Why, what is it? For those of you not hip to E-ink (which probably means you’re just hip in general) here’s a quick rundown. E-ink is a displaying technology sort of like an LCD screen with a couple of big differences. One of the main advantages of E-ink is that looking at an E-ink display is almost exactly like reading a paper document. Part of the reason for that is the crazy high contrast ratio E-ink provides and part of the reason is that E-ink displays aren’t constantly refreshing like an LCD or CRT display. Normally computer displays refresh very very quickly so that the human eye cannot perceive it (remember the flicker on old monitors and TVs….that was the refreshes happening), even if the contents of the screen aren’t changing those displays have to refresh. E-ink displays only update when they have to change the contents of the screen. You know how some people will complain that reading a lot of text off a computer screen is “hard on the eyes?” That complaint should go away with E-ink.

Why is it going to be big? A couple of reasons. Besides being easier to look at than current displays, an E-ink display uses absolutely no energy unless it is refreshing the screen. That means after your ebook reader refreshes the screen with a page of text….the device basically turns off and that page is displayed forever until you tell it to refresh the screen with new text. Imagine the power savings! Most of the time E-ink displays are off but you can still read from them. Another interesting property of E-ink displays is they seem to be particularly well suited to making flexible display screens. Think about a screen that could retract like a projector screen when you’re not using it, or displays that can hug curved surfaces….that pretty cool stuff.

Where are we now? Right now most E-ink displays are just black and white. There are some color models out there but that’s still an area of development. The actual display refresh is also still kind of slow and poky at the moment, with time they hope to speed that up. Currently they are also very expensive, but in time that too should come down. Obviously E-ink isn’t going to replace any screen that needs constant fast refreshes (like your computer screen), but any screen where constant refreshes aren’t a priority E-ink offers a very attractive, easy to read, low power consumption, option.

Perhaps I don’t rock it hard enough.

Apartment dwellers with Rock Band beware. One of my assistants recently got Rock Band and I couldn’t be prouder of him.

First off he called yesterday at 7:00 am to inform me that he wasn’t going to make it into work. Today I learned that he called me right before he went to sleep. He had been playing Rock Band all night long….like a true rock star.

Also, he managed to accumulate three noise complaints from neighbors during his inaugural rock tour. I just wanted to take time to stop and salute the true rock stars that live amongst us.

Thank the internet

This morning I see that “w00t” is the Merriam-Webster word of the year, double-zeros and all. The good folks at Merriam-Webster take their poll on the internet so something like this is bound to happen. Some might question the wisdom of a word that isn’t really a real word winning word of the year. I don’t. I might stop and marvel at democracy in action (the people want to do what?)

If anything I’m kind of disappointed in the internet, why’d you have to go and do that? You weren’t satisfied sticking it to the man with your unconventional words made up of letters and symbols? You had to go and beg for acceptance from the man? Tisk tisk tisk. I didn’t know you were so insecure.

For those of you who are not familiar with the word w00t, let me give you a chance to get to know the word of the year. Fortunately Merriam-Webster recently attempted to codify for you:

1. w00t (interjection) - expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word "yay."

Example usage: w00t! I won the contest!

Of course this does have some grim consequences for Scrabble. Will they be forced to add numbers and special characters in future editions to support the evolution of English?

Super Unsatisfied.

I got my grades for this semester back. I got an A+ and a B. I’m very disappointed in the B. Up until now I’ve had a 4.0 GPA in grad school. I had an A going into the final and evidently I bombed the final, which is surprising because I felt that I had done ok on it.

I’ve already sent an email to check and make sure the grade is accurate. The professor said I was a really good student but was below the median on the final. Blah.

Kind of makes me think the week I spent studying for that final was a poor investment of my time. I could have been goofing off and I would have probably been just as prepared for the test. Stupid B.

Please do your own work.

Well finals are finally over. I’m glad to have one more semester behind me. I don’t know for sure what my grades will be, but I’m hoping that I did well.

Just because I’m done with finals doesn’t mean I can’t still play around with test taking, you know, recreationally. The following quiz is largely adapted from a conversation Dawn and I had in the car on Saturday. Watching the second season of Heroes (which wrapped up last week) might help figure out what the heck is going on here. Basically it’s a quiz to help judge the decision making skills of super heroes.

1.
Situation: You are a special individual with the ability to instant transport anywhere, stop time, and time travel on a mission to save the world. You meet another special individual who also appears to have the ability to stop time on his own mission to save the world. You both seem to be at cross purposes but in an awful hurry to carry out your missions.

Do you:
A. Realize that you two are the lone two individuals in the world that have the luxury of taking all the time they need in order to make informed decisions, stop time, and sit down and attempt to figure out what’s going on.

B. Blunder ahead on your chosen course of action, ignoring any new developments, because you feel like you’re running out of time.

C. Realize that you’re running into a lot of resistance at this current time and place and decide that you have the luxury of picking any time and place you please. Simply travel to a time/location when things are more likely to go your way (how about getting there 2 hours before everyone else and leaving before they show up?)


2.
Situation: You are a special individual with multiple special abilities (stopping time, teleportation, flying, walking through walls, telekinesis, mind reading, shooting lightning bolts, etc). Your dubious friend asks you to get inside a locked vault.

Do you:
A. Attempt to clumsily tear the door off using telekinesis even though you’ve never attempted such a feat before, because even though time appears to be at the essence, you’d like to leave as much evidence that the safe was broken into as possible and try new things.

B. Simply walk through the vault wall, taking your dubious friend with you if you like. Note: this option would be unnecessarily quick, discrete, and leave two of the three people trying to stop your friend stuck on the other side of the vault wall.

C. Option A. in addition to sticking around to pummel the people trying to stop your new dubious friend. Why is it that everyone you’ve met lately does not like your new friend? They keep making vicious claims about his intentions. Don’t you sometimes wish you could read minds and travel through time and space to check the veracity of such statements?


3.
Situation: You are a special individual with the ability to both read and insert thoughts and suggestions into people’s minds. There are currently two people trying to kill off most of the world’s population.

Do you:
A. Run around and shout at people even though you are possibly the most effective communicator that the world has even known and your shouting doesn’t seem to help.

B. Decide that the quickest way to stop a person is to mentally suggest to a person next to them to stop them. Please keep in mind that the person next to them may have the ability to ignore your suggestions while the person actually trying to end the world would be helpless to resist your commands.

C. Simply mentally command the person who is actually trying to end the world to reconsider his actions and confess his dastardly plot to his dimwitted, albeit powerful, companion.


4.
Situation: You are the geneticist Dr. Mohinder. Your super power is vast and unfathomable naivety, often to the point of stupendous stupidity, in any given situation. You eventually realize that the reason your parents named you Mohinder is that to any situation you are a hindrance. Actually a Mo’hinderance….put more succulently you’re Mohinder (see what I did there…clever eh). You’ve recently been given a gun.

Do you:
A. Continue to put yourself, the world, and anyone you’ve ever cared about in perpetual risk by your nonstop bumbling.

B. Make the world a better safer place by taking one for the team and eating a bullet.


Bonus Essay Question:

Explain how Hiro’s ability to stop time works. Be sure to discuss whether or not he is able to stop electromagnetic waves. If so, explore the inconsistencies of being able to stop light and sound waves, explain what happens to reflections in the world if he moves items around but light is unable to move to update reflections. Does Hiro leave tunnels of darkness behind him if he pushes paused light waves out of his way while walking around? Speculate on what it must be like to walk through a paused sound wave.

Sometimes the Winner is a Loser.

My ANTM streak came to an end last week. Both my ponies were on the chopping block. I suppose it’s good that I lost my secret pony (Heather) instead of my actual pony (Jenah). Although I have to admit that I was kind of sad to see my secret pony go, and it looks like I wasn’t the only one.

If you used the “CoverGirl of the Week” as a measure, Heather just might be the most popular contestant who has ever been on ANTM. She has won CoverGirl of the Week nine consecutive weeks. There has only been ten CoverGirl of the Week awards handed out this season. Lisa won the first one and Heather has gotten everyone since then. She even got this week’s CGofW after she was eliminated last time.

That’s some serious fan support. I wonder if ANTM knew they were dealing with such a fan favorite when they were taping this season? I don’t if that would have influenced the outcome (it obviously probably shouldn’t have).

One thing is clear, Heather might be the ultimate winner of this season once it’s all said and over with. That is, if you define winner as the person who receives enough publicity to jumpstart her career. Sure, she won’t get the title of ANTM, but you can ask Jaslene what that’s really worth (I suggest you ask her by email so you don’t have to hear her response).

I found a New York Times article about Heather; it mostly deals with the fact that she’s put a face on a condition that doesn’t get much attention. It’s an interesting read. I’m impressed with how diplomatic all of her answers are….something you might want in a spokesperson. Speaking of which, she says her future ambitions are to continue to try to model and eventually become a national spokesperson for Asperger’s. That seems like a pretty obtainable goal. Dawn says that she read somewhere that Heather is also entertaining the idea of trying to break into videogame design as a fallback career to modeling. I haven’t read that myself, but that might either be pure genius on Heather’s part or pure fantasy on some gamer’s part.

Neighbor’s Yard, I’m not done with you.

While passing the house in our neighborhood with the inflatable Christmas decorations on the way home last night I slowed down. I slowed down so I could properly radiate my rage upon their humble dwelling. The uninformed spectator might have thought I was slowing down to enjoy the yard display but the discerning viewer would have felt the air temperature rise, if ever so slightly. As I slowly lorded pass the house I half expected Dawn to point out I was being an ass (I am often being an ass).

Instead I was surprise when she informed me that my complaints about the house were half-assed. I had done a poor job pointing out all that was wrong with it. So blinded by my rage was I that I failed to notice whole extra dimensions of wrongness that exist. In short, my observations were incomplete. Dawn started to rattle down the list of things she saw wrong with the house that I had failed to mention. I endeavor to recount a few of them here.

The theme of the yard is a runway or landing strip for Santa. To paint the mental picture they have these two rows of blinking lights which delineate a runway through their yard. Various inflatable yard decorations fill the rest of the yard.

One such decoration is an inflatable Santa in a plane, presumably coming in for a landing. This disturbes Dawn to a greater extent than it does me. Evidently Dawn is a strict traditionalist in mythological transportation matters. Santa rides in a sleigh and not in a small airplane. Think of your carbon footprint Santa. Standing next to the runway is another inflatable Santa. Dawn points out how can Santa be riding in his blasphemous plane if he is also standing on the ground waiting for himself to land? She is not down with Santa clones or time traveling Santas or any other rationale for Santa multiplicity.

Near the runway is also an inflatable snowman that is standing next to an inflatable penguin. The penguin was laying horizontal on the ground at the snowman’s feet. The first time we visually parsed this we came to the conclusion that foul play was afoot. But thinking back I think different events must have transpired. My new theory is that the penguin looked around and realized he/she was part of a Christmas decorating travesty and wisely choose to take his/her own life. As we were driving by the snowman probably just discovered the recently deceased bird. I can only hope the snowman realizes the wisdom in the penguin’s actions and decided to follows suit tonight.

At an even greater distance from the runway there are both inflatable SpongeBob SquarePants and inflatable Grinch. Dawn considers this juxtaposition of alternate Christmas universe characters with blatant children’s cartoon character marketing to be a mortal sin. The mere fact that there are Antarctic birds associating with multiple North-pole dwelling mythological beings and despicable cartoon characters and Dr Seuss characters and snowmen indicates to me a certain lack of focus of vision while constructing the tableaux.

The final insult was revealed to us as we turned our eyes upwards….up on the roof….there arose such a clatter…we spied a third Santa. Three inflatable Santa in one display - unforgivable. Dawn was super-unsatisfied with this final observation.

Deck the yard... with trash

I hate inflatable holiday yard decorations. There, I said it. The fact that anyone buys them, or that they appear to be gaining popularity, gives me great pause when contemplating our country’s shared aesthetic values. I have no proof that the same people who buy these front yard abominations are also wearing Crocks….but I have my suspicions. After all, it would take someone with that dearth of personal style to look at a giant inflatable Santa, snowman, or what-have-you and gleefully imagine it disgracing their house and neighbors.

I mean it, I really dislike them (the yard ornaments not the people….well, ok, in all likelihood the people as well). At night, when the inflatable illuminated yard decoration can be said to be at their “best” it’s still not very good. I have two primary complaints about them. I’ll list them in ascending order.

Complaint one: The sameness. Every inflatable snowman decoration you buy looks exactly like every other inflatable snowman bought. There is no individuality. If two people buy the same box of Christmas lights their decorations will look different because lights are amorphous and take the shape of the individual's home (or bush or tree).

Complaint two: During the day your house looks like a landfill. This is my primary complaint with inflatable lawn decorations. In order for them to “work” you have to keep a fan blowing air into them. Most people turn that fan off during the day….meaning that the decorations deflate and then just flop around in their yard. It looks like a giant plastic bag. The very first time I saw one during the day I actually thought it was a large piece of garbage that had unfortunately blown in to the yard….after I realized that it was a large piece of garbage that the owner had purposely placed in the yard….and then staked down so it couldn’t get away - I died a little on the inside. Oh how very ghetto.

Anything this ugly has to be a fad. I suspect the people who buy these decorations will look back years from now and hang their head in shame that they participated in such a grim blight on the holidays. Or at least, they should.

[Someone in our neighborhood has decided to decorate their yard with multiple of these so-called decorations and I have to pass it everyone morning on my way to work and every evening on my way home. I find it to be unacceptable.]

Fetch the lawn clippings, we're making Tiki drinks!

In the past I have gone on record as subscribing to the Alton Brown school of mixology, namely that, a good drink is sort of like a musical chord. There is a base note or spirit, a modifier or mixer, and then maybe an accent (bitters, twist, perhaps and olive). A chord should have at least three notes, strictly musically speaking, but I believe there are probably two note drinks that work just fine. The point of the Alton Brown analogy is to point out what happens if you keep adding more and more notes to a musical chord….eventually you have a dissonant cacophony of noise.

From this point of view most Tiki drinks are like listening to an orchestra warm up; perhaps the Rhesus and Langur Philharmonic. To my mind, usually more ingredients does not equal better drink. However, I was intrigued by the Tiki drink article I highlighted yesterday and decided perhaps I owe Tiki drinks another chance. I selected one of the recipes included with the article and decided to give it a try. I selected Hot Coffee Grog, being the cold-ish weather put me in a warm drink kind of mood. I’ll include the recipe here for you non-hyperlink clickers:

Hot Coffee Grog
1 sugar cube or 1 heaping teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon honey
1 teaspoon unsalted butter
Pinch of grated nutmeg
Pinch of ground clove
Pinch of powdered cinnamon
3 strips orange peel, about 1/2-inch wide
1 strip grapefruit peel, about 1/2-inch wide
6 ounces steaming hot coffee
1 ounce dark Jamaican rum, such as Appleton Estate V/X
2 drops vanilla extract
Cinnamon stick.

Place all ingredients in a heatproof glass or mug and stir until butter melts and sugar dissolves.
Yield: One drink.

First off this is not a drink to make if you want a quick cup of coffee. In fact this is probably the slowest cup of coffee you’ll ever prepare in your life. Look at all the ingredients that go into it. Jeeze. The time to make the drink is probably only exacerbated by the fact that it was me making the drink. Anyone who has watched me (and tapped their foot anxiously) while I mix drinks knows what I’m talking about. I like to take my time.

Still I was intrigued by this drink because the coffee is not diluted down with milk or cream or some other ingredient that tries to turn black coffee into something else. The drink is essentially black coffee. There is a pat of butter in it, sure, but there is probably a reason coffee drinkers that require cream don’t reach for Land-o-Lakes when the half-and-half runs out.

I had to make a few substitutions since I didn’t schedule a special shopping trip to make the drink. I ended up replacing all the citrus peel with lemon peel. It was the only citrus we had in the house. I also ended up having to substitute lighter rum for the dark Jamaican rum. I figured if the drink was appealing with light rum the darker rum could only make it better.

Looking at order of assembly, I decided to add the coffee last. I wanted the coffee to be as hot as possible when I added it so it could better dissolve the honey and sugar and I was afraid the drink might cool down too much while I was digging around in my pantry for all of the spices and “measuring” them. As I went about adding all the spices to empty coffee cups I got the strange feeling that I was trying to turn my coffee into an apple pie (cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, etc).

Presentation-wise these drinks were a hit. There something special about see a mug with a cinnamon stick sticking out of it and a little pillow of fat melting away. Stirring the drink with the cinnamon stick to thoroughly incorporate the butter is a fun little interactive game you get to play with your drink before you drink it.

As far as taste goes, I liked it. It tasted like festive black coffee. There was a lot going on, but it was still coffee. I don’t know how different it is than buying a flavored coffee…. I suppose the grog is automatically superior because it has alcohol in it and you get to make sure none of the flavorings are wretched. I think I liked it better than Dawn did, but it’s probably because it’s hard to be weaned of off Starbuck coffee drinks we’re they successfully hide the taste of coffee with milk and sugar. I’d probably make it again while entertaining because the drink just feels special…. Of course I’m also interested in trying to strip it down to a proper three note chord. I’m thinking black coffee, Irish whiskey, and cloves.

Tiki Drink Manifesto

I’ve mentioned this article in the New York Times to a couple of people already; it’s a pretty interesting article about Tiki drinks.

It’s about a guy named Jeff Berry who has been called “the Indiana Jones of tiki drinks.” Basically Jeff’s position is that modern Tiki drinks are sugery and terrible but they don’t have to be and in fact originally they weren’t. He’s made it his life mission to track down the original drink recipes which tend to be more complex and better balanced in an effort to elevate the art of Tiki drinks.

Perhaps a bit of history is in order to put his quest in perspective. According to the NYT article (I’ve done no independent research on Tiki drinks) the Tiki drink movement took root in the 1930’s and lasted about forty years before sputtering out. It’s recently made a resurgence in the last ten years.

At the forefront of the original 1930’s movement was a man named Ernest Raymound Beaumont-Gantt, who (wisely) went by the mixologist name Donn Beach. Donn Beach is supposedly the original inventor of some of the most popular Tiki drinks and his concoctions took the country by storm. To quote:

“… Mr. Beach was a gifted mixologist, and his drinks were the real thing. His “Rum Rhapsodies” were elaborate concoctions that called for multiple brands of rum, fresh fruit juice, crushed ice, obscure syrups and esoteric ingredients like honey-butter mix.”

The only thing is Donn Beach also closely guarded his drink recipes. And not closely guarded his drink recipe like if you asked for the recipe he declined to tell you closely guarded. No, Donn Beach kept all of his drink recipes in code. According to Jeff Berry, “a recipe might say one half-ounce of number two, a dash of number four.”

Jeff learned that some of the bar staff kept their coded recipes black books and over the years he’s been able to acquire a few of them. He now spends his time trying to crack the codes. Jeff has frequented a bar that is run by the son and grandson of one of the original bar staff employed by Don Beach. By ordering drinks and attempting to watch and reverse engineer them he’s been able to figure out a couple of the code names for ingredients like “Golden Stack” (a particular brand of rum) and “Markeza” (that means passion fruit syrup).

In addition to ordering Tiki drinks in bars Jeff also does research by pouring over old cooking magazines and recipe books in the hopes of finding a recipe or two that Donn Beach did make public. If the same recipe happens to be in one of his coded black books he can use it as a Rosetta stone to further decode other drinks. It’s not all smooth sailing though:

“Mr. Berry’s own arrival at the Zombie recipe is convoluted. In 2002, he stumbled upon an old copy of “Barbecue Chef,” a cookbook self-published in 1950 by one Louis A. Spievak that contained a Zombie recipe supposedly given to Mr. Spievak by Donn Beach himself. Following the formula, which called for three kinds of rum, three kinds of juice and passion fruit syrup, Mr. Berry was pleased to discover a superb drink.

A few years later, he found another Donn Beach-sanctioned Zombie recipe — this one in a 1956 issue of the men’s magazine Cabaret. That recipe called for 11 ingredients, only five of them matching the Spievak formula. The drink was equally good but darker in color and heavier in body.

Then the story took one more twist. In 2005, Mr. Berry was given a little black book belonging to a Beachcomber waiter named Dick Santiago that dated to around 1937. The notebook contained a recipe for “Zombie Punch,” which was the drink’s original name. Mr. Berry concluded that the recipe was truly the original Zombie formula, and set about decoding an ingredient listed cagily as “Don’s Mix” (two parts grapefruit juice to one part cinnamon-infused sugar syrup, it turns out).”

So Jeff spends years trying to resurrect Tiki drink recipes. An interesting story no doubt….but is his effort worth it? There are a couple of “original” Tiki drink recipes included with the NYT’s article. Tune in tomorrow and I’ll discuss my experiences with one of them! (I’m sure you can’t wait)