Naked Silvia and Riesberries plus Eddie, God and Zeus

If the double-shot basket isn't adequately (fully) packed, the flow rate is going to be too high and result in underextraction even if the grind is finer than usual. The basket should be groomed to the brim before tamping.

That said, here are some almost-good-enough-to-post-but-I'm-impatient-and-posting-them-anyway shots of why bottomless portafilters are dead sexy:
The grind was both finer than usual and ever so slightly overpacked. But I do love catching the individual droplets in mid-air...

On a related note, we found a bottle of Montinore Semi-Dry Riesling. This used to be our bar-none favorite white wine because it smacked of pineapple and other summery things. It doesn't do that anymore, which made me a bit sad -- so I added some raspberries to it!
The raspberries added just the extra bit of fruit flavor the wine needed and, when left to soak in the riesling long enough, were the most astoundingly and iconickly -- it's a word now! -- delicious raspberries I've ever tasted. And the spouse agrees.

Diverging from the food topic, seeing Eddie Izzard on his Stripped tour in which he stakes out a theological position more humanist than Kurt Vonnegut (who actually did know stuff about the Bible beyond the abject basics -- read the last chapter of Palm Sunday, it's brilliant) evidently based on the long-standing narrative that God is some old euro-guy with a big white beard. And what clearly stuck me about this narrative, what with so much of Eddie's schtick being history-based (and on this point Stripped was barely adequate; Dressed to Kill is still my favorite performance of his -- but it's still worth seeing live), was that the old-man-God narrative that has been propigated up not necessarily from the Judeo-Christian God, but rather from the polytheistic religions, especially the Greeks with old-man-Zeus transferring to the Romans with old-man-Jupiter claiming to adopt Christianity some three centuries after the core facts and then imperializing up to the British, by Jove. If you doubt this, then ask yourself why some people, especially young Christians, expect God to smite heretics and blasphemers with lightning -- the weapon of choice for Zeus/Jupiter -- when, as near as I can tell, the Bible contains no record of God smiting anybody with lightning per se. So the short of this issue comes down to: Are many Christians worshipping Zeus by mistake? Is that why the core gospel of the religion can make it the most popular religion in the world and yet the full and complex tradition of the religion incites intellectual backlash? If anybody's seen deeper research or hypothesis on this, please post it otherwise I may have found a historical niche I want to dig into later on in life...