Pic(k) of the Week: Yuletide scaffolding

A city streetlamp, festooned with plastic wreath and bow, 'cheerified' the dreary scaffolding behind it. As seen in downtown Decatur, Georgia, USA. 16 December 2023. (What you can't see is the cold winter rain that had just begun to fall.)

I took other —more 'traditional'— Yuletide images but I especially like this one, exemplifying the photography dictum to turn around and look behind you! I thought it a fitting inaugural Pic(k) of the Week for year 2024.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Outlier No. 19 Helms Deep Bierschnaps

Tippling a dram

From a barrel of collaboration. 

Warming a winter's night.

In the tasting room at Independent Distilling Company: Decatur, Georgia, USA. 16 December 2023.

Our Outlier No. 19 Helms Deep Bierschnaps is a collaboration with our friends at Three Taverns Brewery (Decatur, Georgia). We distilled their famous Helms Deep Imperial Stout, then aged it in a used Hellbender Bourbon barrel for four years. Enjoy rich aromas of heavily roasted malts on the nose that translate, on the palate, into rich cocoa, lush dark fruits, hints of cereal, vanilla, and coffee, and dense oak. One in our limited Outlier Series: only 95 bottles produced. 42.5% alcohol-by-volume.

This series of weekly photos (which began in 2009) begins anew next week for a new year. As the final Pic(k) of the Week for 2023, I thought it appropriate to post an image of a good fermentable. To all my readers, I wish you a safe, healthy, prosperous, and tasty 2024.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Stille Nacht

Happy Christmas to all,
and to all a good night.

Decatur Presbyterian Church
downtown Decatur, Georgia, USA.
22 December 2023.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Beneath Stone Mountain

Trees, deciduous and evergreen, stand on a northern bank of Venable Lake, 825 feet (251 meters) beneath the granitic summit of Stone Mountain. As seen from the Cherokee Trail, a five-mile walking trail that circumnavigates the base of the mountain, in DeKalb County, Georgia, USA. 14 November 2023.

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About

1. Stone Mountain is a quartz-granite monadnock:

   an isolated rock hill, knob, ridge, or small mountain that rises abruptly from a gently sloping or virtually level surrounding plain, typically by surviving erosion. The word 'monadnock' is a Native American term.

   — Wikipedia.




2. The transmission tower of WGTV can be seen at the summit.

   WGTV is a PBS (Public Broadcasting System) member television station licensed to Athens, Georgia, United States, a legacy of the station's early years as a service of the University of Georgia. Owned by the Georgia Public Telecommunications Commission (technically under the Georgia Board of Regents, along with the University System of Georgia), it is the flagship station of the statewide Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) television network, serving the Atlanta metropolitan area from a transmitter atop Stone Mountain just east of Atlanta.

   — Wikipedia.



3. There are only a few natural lakes in the state of Georgia. Venable Lake, at Stone Mountain Park, is not one of them. Created by submerging a former quarry, it is named for the past owner of the quarry, a segregationist leader of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century. In fact, the summit at Stone Mountain was the site of the re-founding of the Ku Klux Klan,'commemorated' with a cross-burning, on Thanksgiving eve, 1915.

Notwithstanding its historical connection to human atrocities, the physical beauty of Stone Mountain —rising abruptly over exurban-Atlanta and home to sui generis flora— can be quite dramatic. As witnessed, above, on a crisp autumn morning.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Fallen

Fallen, 

The tree in gloom. 

Forsaken,
Its erstwhile matins.

Dense morning fog in a woodland.
Legacy Park: Decatur, Georgia, USA. 2 December 2023.

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