Nermo

Inspired by the Carnivorous Cocktails seminar at Tales, I started Sunday brunch with the BLTini, a sandwich in a glass.

I like my BLTs on potato bread, so I opted for vodka over gin, squeezed the bejeezus out of a gorgeous heirloom tomato, then decided that lettuce was lame and so opted for basil as an aromatic garnish.

Tip: bacon is best for this purpose when crispy, flat and most of the fat has been rendered off, so I devised this little trick.  Lay raw bacon in a hot pan and then put a Pyrex baking dish on top, pressing the bacon flat while it cooks. Creates perfect cocktail bacon.

BLTini

• 2 ounces vodka (plain or citrus)
• 2 ounces tomato water (see note)
• 1 dash dry vermouth
• 1 piece crispy bacon
• 1 basil leaf

Shake vodka, tomato water and vermouth with ice to chill and strain into a chilled martini glass.  Stir with bacon, and literally clap once with the basil leaf on your palm to release the aromatic oils before floating it in the glass.

Note: to make tomato water I diced the tomato, wrapped it in cheese cloth and squeezed out as much liquid as I could.  When my hand got tired, I put the whole pulpy package into a citrus squeezer, extracted the rest and filtered the tomato water through a fine mesh strainer.  A medium-large heirloom yields about 2 ounces of juice, less than you will get with a roma of comparable size.

This isn’t about ideals; it’s about abbreviations.  I kind of hate myself for the title grammar, but I’d rather be awkward than wrong.  Wait, I’m not sure that’s true.

Anyway, I’m at a nerd conference and at this and other moments when I’ve worn my URL on a name tag, people ask me what Nermo means and I create an elaborate, absurd fiction.

The truth of the matter is that I found it by searching expiring web address registrations with 5 characters excluding numbers and dashes.  Let’s face it, all the real 5-letter words are taken, so I was happy to find something that looks like it could be a word.

I’m calling you all to suggest a good meaning for Nermo as an acronym. Maybe the letters N-E-R-M-O can acquire meaning actually relevant to the site.

Alright, start submitting those comments.

Sorry folks, but upgrading to WordPress 2.7 was more involved than I expected, and I have work to do, so it will be a little while before I restore my photos and layout.  Happy March.

UPDATE (3/6):  Images are back up, and I’ll get to the visual elements of the theme eventually.

I’m finally building a front page for nermo.com and while I was at The Lab‘s annual Post-Postcard show Friday, I was reminded of the Home Fugu Chef Kit I designed for the show 2 years ago, and of the Mr. Yuck-inspired “tetrodotoxin poisoning” sticker for the chef’s guests to put on their foreheads before dining so paramedics would know how to treat them once found, and I painted a cute little picture of a pufferfish with a sumi-e brush for the sticker.  I need to clean it up, but here is the original sticker and a few site logo ideas:

Your thoughts?

Officiating My First Wedding

Sinister Minister? Signing the marriage license.

I officiated a friend’s wedding last weekend, and although I played this one straight, it got me thinking about the potential for officiating weddings as more of a performance piece. Of course this would be done in league with the couple to create some sort of spectacle, and not at their expense.  Regardless, I’ve got a perfect record so far: 1 wedding; 0 divorces.

Maybe I can set up nermo.com as the site for my new wedding officiant business.

Inspired by an irritating work of public art funded by the San Francisco Art Commission and placed along advertisements on municipal buses, I’m thinking this site might be a good place to launch a response to bad ad art, particularly misguided PR campaigns that intend to warm the public in a way that only disturbs the intended audience.

I’ll post images of the initial art below. Essentially, they are simple portraits of Muni drivers with an anecdote from their career. My favorite is Vawanda, who tells the story of an attempted bus-jacking. Just what I want to read while riding.

I’m thinking it would be fun to make pieces in response, printed to blend with the originals, but taking the simply upsetting stories to a new level of horror, which I would slip into place on buses all over the city. Anybody want to help?

“After a particularly long night at the Lusty Lady and still a bit “UI,” I picked up my first passengers of the day. They seemed irritated as I veered from the standard route, but a couple of hard stomps on the brake pedal let them know who was in charge. They need to understand that when Jimmy The Tooth says he’ll only be on the corner of 6th and Market for another ten minutes, you need to be willing to adapt. I should have known the brakes would go out on me again, but the retread tires shredding was a real surprise.  I can’t say that was the last time I mixed Schedule II controlled substances with alcohol on the job, but it certainly was the most interesting. -Bob, MUNI Operator since 1991″

From: http://www.helenakeeffe.com/archives/000046.html

Addendum to my last post. I forgot to include these notes on the topic, which I had jotted on a napkin and then misplaced:

Marketing all prints as “hermeneutically sealed” as opposed to “hermetically sealed”

Using elements of old ephemera in the designs

Hole-punching designs, or perhaps the monetary value into the prints.

Once I get bored with the site in it’s pre-reformation form, I stage a neo/net Lutheran hacker attack on my own site, posting that they have taken control of nermo.com and demand reformation, post a page of 95 theses on the homepage. Maybe it will just be 95 links to pictures of those awful lolcats.

Using renaissance design elements in the layout of the site.

Designing the site with a central navigation menu, splitting the site right down the middle, because everyone has one on the side or top.

I’ve been toying with the indulgences idea a little more.

I’ve been getting back into silkscreen printing lately, and was thinking it would be fun to hand-print big, beautiful, frame-worthy certificates of the indulgences as limited edition pieces of art. To tie them into the website, and reinforce the notion of the indulgences as the virtual, spiritual commodity, I’m thinking of encouraging their transfer, sale, barter, etc. and putting a tracking number rather than an edition number, and having the current owner “register” with the site. I’ll have to come up with some sort of incentive to get them to play along.

Also mocking a trend I so greatly enjoy, I was thinking of selling them as “sin offset credits” tied into the seven deadly sins and/or the ten commandments.

I’m thinking of calling it the First Hypertextual Church of Nermo.

Here’s my latest idea: set up the site as a non-profit org that works with communities to relocate their hipster infestation to other areas. As every city seems to have issues with young urbanites invading their neighborhoods, but nobody seems to view himself or herself as a hipster (none of my hipster friends would categorize themselves as such), nobody will be offended and everyone will love the idea. We could take a neighborhood-by-neighborhood approach. There’s the Mission District in San Francisco, Brooklyn, Wicker Park in Chicago, and many more in every other city in the country.
80′s culture seems to be making a return (evident in hipster fashion), so why not the mantra of “Die Yuppie Scum!” There were also a number of projects in that decade to relocate the homeless by rounding up local derelicts, and giving them bus tickets to warmer climates. Even in my progressive hometown of Burlington, VT there was a notorious fund-raiser held at one of my favorite bistros to send the undesirables west (you can read a bit about it here). We could scour the country for a derelict industrial district rife with warehouses and factories ready to be converted into lofts, build up a buzz and throw a big send-off party. We could even just lure them all onto buses with the promise of free vintage clothing and an open bar, and once they’re all passed out drunk, just have the drivers take them all away.

As is the trend among sites with short, easy to remember, yet senseless names, maybe I should make Nermo a “deal of the day” site where every 24 hours I put up a new product for sale. This being my website, and deserving of my personal twist, perhaps I will post a really bizarre and ridiculous product daily, like tinfoil sold as mind-ray blocking hat liners or a yo-yo labeled “perpetual motion device.”

Traditional Examples:
Shnoop
Woot
Fruper
Tanga
Yugster
Stootsi
Lootpig
Pozy