As always, I am grateful for the kindness with which you reacted to our tragedy.

(Green is the meat temperature, purple is the grill temp.) Our second run at pulled pork was wildly successful. We used a different rub (hickory garlic, very tasty) but I think the big differences were in cooking technique. First off, I foiled the pork butt at around 150 degrees. This is where you wrap the thing in foil with a half a cup of water or apple juice in it. As the chart below shows, this more or less eliminated the stall while the moisture from the meat evaporates. ...

Quick notes: Planked wild salmon from Schaub’s, which is not an everyday kind of treat but man it’s good stuff: soak the cedar planks, let them heat up for 4-5 minutes at 400 degrees, put the salmon in skin down for 20 minutes. You cook these longer than salmon right on the grill because it’s effectively indirect heat. Burgers: 500 degrees, 2 minutes on either side, close the dome and bottom vent, let them sit for 4-5 minutes to finish up. First time out I put the cast iron half moon in when I put the burgers on, which sucked away a lot of heat, so they were a tad rare. Next time we’ll skip that bit.

We got a Big Green Egg. (Darry Smith, Eggs By The Bay, sold it to us. Great guy, highly recommended.) Pricy, but cheaper than an iPad and we’ll be using it longer, so no qualms about the purchase. Neither Susan or I have any grilling experience. We’ve done three meals, all of which turned out perfectly from a cooking perspective. I am not great at marinades yet but that’s a different question. The Egg is stupid easy to use. This weekend we embark on a pork butt as our first smoking attempt. ...

We cranked over to Half Moon Bay yesterday for breakfast and a bit of sightseeing. I am somewhat baffled as to how I managed to spend ten years in Silicon Valley without doing much of that sort of thing, but that’s youth for you, I guess. The drive over 92 is lovely, and the Pacific is still there, and Half Moon Bay has a reasonably cute downtown. I recommend Chez Shea (original) despite the cutesy name. You can sit out in the patio, on which subject see photograph. ...

I’m too sad to review Prometheus. I will say that it’s absolutely gorgeous and I am glad I saw it on a quality screen. Ridley Scott’s eye for composition and spectacle is still remarkable. There’s nothing wrong with the directing, the acting is mostly very good, and conceptually the movie worked. The script sucked, though. Kept trying to reach big emotional beats, but none of them had proper setup, and without setup there is no payoff. I do have a theory, though, which is full of spoilers.{{ double-space-with-newline }}

So here I am back in the SF Bay Area. What goes around, etc. In related news, I’m employed again, so that’s good. The first week on the job was good; I am looking forward to making the second week even better. We found a house up in Redwood City, which gives me a half an hour commute to Palo Alto for work and puts us in reasonable range of the city. It’s also pretty convenient to 280, which makes Santa Cruz and San Jose very feasible. I like the location – hadn’t ever lived up there before but I think we’ll enjoy it. Fingers crossed. ...

I’ve been reading a lot of AlternetHistory.com lately. Someone challenged the board to come up with an AH in which the Internet was unrecognizable with a point of divergence later than Jan 1st, 1989. I couldn’t do it; by that time you already have at least two regional ISPs. If you somehow prevent Bob Rieger from turning Netcom into a business, Barry Shein still gets The World underway. I don’t think the One Great Man theory applies to consumer-oriented ISPs. But if you’re willing to push the POD a couple of months earlier, you might be able to do something. None of this seems de

Conservation of attention notice: if you’re from Austin you know all this. We drove down to Lockhart today with Susan’s parents to do the barbecue pilgrimage. This is not the only possible barbecue pilgrimage, even in Central Texas. There’s Luling and Taylor and Llano, but Lockhart is pretty damned close and it’s home to a few legendary barbecue places, so we wanted to see what it was all about. Being heathens from out of state and all. ...

I like fiction delivered to a convenient and elegant place to read! So: Go to ifttt, log in/register/whatever Create a new task. Choose the Feed trigger. Choose New Feed Item. Use the Feed URL https://hilobrow.com/tag/world-shook/feed/, on the assumption that you want to read HiLoBrow’s H. Rider Haggard serialization. Feed it into Instapaper (or Readability if you like that). You can leave the default field values alone. If this is your first time using ifttt, you’ll need to register the channel first. Give it a description. Or just go ahead and use the recipe I made.