Seems like everything gets turned into a competition these days. I wrote about four unusual battles royale for the March issue of Wired. Artists hustle before a live audience to draw the best pictures and the winner basks in the light of glory (as in the photo above) at Super Art Fight. Do-it-yourselfers race handmade and hand-powered cars down railroad tracks while wearing period costumes at the Great Handcar Regatta. Butchers hack up a steer into valuable steaks at the Eat Real Fest. And hardy crazy people run all night and day in the mountains of Vermont with breaks to chop wood, reconstruct Lego sculptures, and translate Greek into English while standing waist deep in freezing water at the Death Race.

They say you might die during that race. For more on that, here’s an entertaining video from the New York Times:

Surviving the Death Race

One of the benefits of being a home brewer (see more about that at my other site, awesomepickle.com) is that you have license to try a lot of beer, and a lot of different kinds of beer. In the last few years a new kind of store has popped up to help beer lovers discover beer’s many styles, a lot like wine bars and tasting rooms have done for wine drinkers. I wrote an article in the New York Times about five such tasting rooms for beer.

Say you want to know more about what distinguishes a Kolsch (which is in the bottles above, photo by the inimitable Phil) and a Helles than Wikipedia and BeerAdvocate can tell you? At these stores you can taste the difference. With education as their goal, they stock hundreds of kinds of bottled craft beer and keep a constant rotation on the tap. They’ll recommend beer and food pairings and they tend to be liberal with the free samples, too. But don’t tell them I told you that.

My homemade, unpasteurized sauerkraut (and photos of it) will be on display and up for trade at the exhibition Non*Mart at Y2Y Gallery in San Francisco from November 6 till January 15, 2010. See more details about eating some at the opening at my post about it on awesomepickle.com or at the show and gallery links. Click the pic for a bigger flyer.

Friends, I have another website on this fine internet of ours. It’s called awesomepickle.com and it’s dedicated to the awesome world of fermented food and drink. The contents are mostly recipes for pickling food at home with the help of live microorganisms Food prepared this way is very healthy. It also tastes delicious and never fails to impress friends and strangers alike. I recommend you go to the wbsite immediately, make some sour dills or sauerkraut, brew some beer, and then enjoy the fruit of your labors with a grilled cheese sandwich.

Although I haven’t had much to put up here for the past few weeks, I swear I’ve been working. Editing doesn’t deliver the bylines the way writing does. There are some articles are in the works, though.