First-Person View of Earl Opening a Bottle of Coke

Opening a bottle of Coke while I should be writing, as the sign helpfully notes. 

Soda Can Turrets

I painted a pair of 3D-printed turrets made to incorporate soda cans. Cute! I'll use them for Star Schlock objectives. 

Terra Losa Rainbow

On Saturday night, a rainbow appeared on the drive from Mom's place to home. I shot a photo of it with my phone before picking up a Coke for Sylvia. 
 

All Aboard the Coke Train

 

98,000 Calories

On Saturday, a half-dozen friends assembled at Steve's for some board gaming. During the evening, several of my buddies used mobile apps to record the beers they were drinking, in much the same way as I use Letterboxd to record the films I've watched.

"Someone should make an app like that for Coke," I said.

"They'll never do it," Jeff replied. "People would stop drinking it."

I knew exactly what Jeff meant; if people realized how much soda they were drinking, they'd become more aware of the extent of their habit. So I quickly calculated the health impact of the Coke I drink, estimating two cans a day at 140 calories a can. My eyes bulged when I saw that amounted to a staggering 98,000 calories a year, which Pete and Mike helpfully translated into about 25 pounds of extra weight a year. Holy Moley! No wonder I've fattened up over the years.

Dark Nemesis

Two 28 mm Coke Machines

I finished painting a pair of 28mm Coke machines. As you can see, they look pretty sloppy up close. Jeff suggested using a miniature roller to paint the raised Coke logo, but I couldn't find such a tool. I also tried several kinds of white paint, and all of them were difficult to work with, forming ugly clumps. What is it about white model paint..? 

I'll probably do one more round of touch-ups on this project, but I think they're good enough to throw into the field now if needs be. I plan to use them as scenery for Villains & Vigilantes or Wasteland Warfare. 

Bat-Can

Earl's Chili Insanity Version 2.0

According to the peanut gallery, yesterday's chili recipe isn't viable. Based on some vague suggestions from friends and family and my own seasoned second thought, here's an amended recipe:

2 kg extra lean ground beef
1 can corn kernels
2 cans tomato sauce
2 tbsp Cajun seasoning
1 tbsp chili powder
100 g sliced jalapeno peppers
100 g walnut pieces
100 g water chestnuts
100 g diced onions
250 g diced red, green and yellow peppers

Throw everything into a slow cooker and cook it at, um...medium..?...for eight hours. Top with sour cream, diced green onions and shredded cheddar, mozza and Monterey Jack.

Serve with deeply chilled bottles of ice-cold Coca-Cola and garlic toast. 

Earl's Chili Insanity

I don't know how to cook, but that won't stop me from imagining the best chili ever. I imagine something like this:

2 kg extra lean ground beef
1 can corn kernels
2 tbsp Cajun seasoning
1 tsp cumin
100 g sliced jalapeno peppers
100 g walnut pieces
100 g water chestnuts
100 g diced onions
250 g diced red, green and yellow peppers

Throw everything into a frying pan and fry it on, I don't know, 7? Cook until it's done. Top with sour cream, diced green onions and shredded cheddar, mozza and edam.

Serve with deeply chilled bottles of ice-cold Coca-Cola and garlic toast. 

From High Above

The Last Cherry Coke

Jarring Cola Irony

Thursday's lunch at the Jasper Avenue 3 Amigos with Dustin, Mike and Pete resulted in very good food and very poor service. Arriving at precisely noon, our food arrived at the table at 12:55, which meant I had to wolf my food down like a ravenous beast in order to get back to work as quickly as possible. Also, I thought it amusing that the waitress laid down Coca-Cola coasters for our drinks, including my Jarritos Mexican cola (which is also quite tasty). 

G&Glass

I'm still working my way through the hundreds of photos I took in Ottawa at Gaming & Guinness IX, but in the meantime here's a shot of my first use of one of the terrific swag items created by Mike and Rob for the event: the official G&G IX tumbler. Sure, it's full of Coke rather than Guinness, but I think it's still serving a noble purpose.

I'm quite taken with the logo design: the tumbling dice, which has become a recurring theme in the logos, the reversed "G" serving as the 9, the rocket-looking silhouette of Parliament, evoking any number of spaceships from games we played like Firefly or Warhammer. Excellent job, gentlemen. 

Cola Haiku

Icy cola foam
So sweet it brings bitter tears
A syrup addict

Why Are Dimes Smaller than Nickels?

Today I took the elevator down to the third floor with $1.10 in hand for the Coke machine. As I was rummaging through the change in my palm I wondered for the umpteenth time why the dimes were smaller than the nickels - smaller, even, than the pennies, back when pennies were still a part of our daily lives.

From doubloon to loonie to quarter to dime, there's a nice progression - smaller size equals smaller value. But once you hit the nickel, calamity. It's bigger than the dime! And while the penny, at least, was smaller than the nickel, it, too, was larger than the dime!

Oh sure, once upon a time nickels were made of nickel, dimes were made of silver and pennies were made of copper, and each coin was sized so that the face value matched the amount of metal in the coin, and since silver was worth more than copper or nickel, of course it would take less metal to make ten cents' worth of dime than five cents' worth of nickel or a penny's worth of copper. That sounds like wafer-thin reasoning from the mint to me, but that's the argument. Now that nickels aren't made out of nickel nor dimes out of silver, why continue to bow to tradition? Resize the coins! Or to simplify matters, make the nickel the dime and the dime the nickel, now that the penny has dropped.

To coin a phrase, our change needs change!

Sean Coke Zoom

Select a relatively slow shutter speed, hit the shutter release, zoom out while the shutter's open and you'll be rewarded with streaks of light dopplering into the distance. It would probably look better if I used a tripod and some kind of remote device to crank the lens. Still, I think the begonias look particularly cool.

Ice Cap-tastrophe

Once a week, Sylvia and I travel to Tim Horton's to replenish her supply of Ice Caps. Consequently, during the drive home her lap is home to a half-dozen of the chilly coffee drinks, perched there rather precariously. "One day we're going to hit a bump and those are going to fly all over the place," I've noted more than once.

I often tease Sylvia about her near-addiction to Ice Caps, if only because it rivals my own fondness for Coca-Cola. Sometimes the form of that teasing takes a macabre turn.

"What if," I speculated the other day, "We rolled the car while transporting a load of Ice Caps? Not an accident where we'd be hurt, but just one of those lucky no-injury crashes. We'd land wheels-up, but we'd both have Ice Cap goo all over us. We'd be drenched in it."

"You'd love that," she remarked, sipping her drink.

Well, aside from the expense of repairing the car, maybe. If nothing else, it might make a good scene in one of those Wes Anderson-style farces...



 

Big Mug of Coke

Choked Over Cherry Coke

Cherry Coke is available only sporadically in Canada, so while Sylvia and I were in Las Vegas I bought two two-litre bottles and 24 cans of the bubbly nectar and brought them back over the border. Today my precious supply ran dry.

I have a weakness for Coca-Cola and "red" flavours - cherry, strawberry, raspberry. When I first encountered Cherry Coke in the late 80s, my Coke addiction took on a new, fruitier (though sadly, not more nutritious) dimension. Even then it was hard to find; I remember encountering it only in convenience stores and gas stations, never at the supermarket. Now it's nowhere to be found, at least in western Canada.

However, while stopping for lunch in Vegas I encountered Cherry Coke's precursor, the soda fountain staple known simply as cherry cola. In fact, I found the fountain concoction superior to the canned variety. Inspired, I scoured the Internet for a home-brewed cherry cola recipe, and discovered that it's as simple as adding 30 mL of maraschino cherry juice to a glass of Coca-Cola. It'll make the perfect beverage for my blackened Cajun strips. By the way, thanks to Jeff Shyluk for emailing me a very complex but clear method for that project. I haven't abandoned it!