Egregious Blunders & what-not, part II

Whelp...

2012-01-05T19:15:00.000-05:00

I suppose this is the worst thing that happened to me last year..

2012-01-05T19:06:00.003-05:00

At least I didn't lose teeth, and I only have myself to blame.

Birthday remembrances

2011-10-05T11:39:00.004-04:00

Dad would have been 85 today.

Here's a picture from 1991, a typical image and familiar to me.

I'll have a drink or two tonight in your honor. Cheers, Dad.

The civilizing process never penetrated the South ..."

2011-10-02T16:20:00.003-04:00

Interesting viewpoint from a book review in yesterday's Wall Street Journal

This fact raises the interesting question of why America's murder rate, though it has fallen sharply in recent years, is still so much higher than that of England. Mr. Pinker's answer is clear: One must compare the regions of the United States with England. The homicide rate of New England is almost exactly the same as that of England, and in our far-north states, such as the Dakotas and the Pacific Northwest, it is even lower. But in Louisiana and most of the South it is much higher. The civilizing process never penetrated the South as it did New England. Instead, a culture of honor, a weak police tradition and a shortage of penitentiaries left Southerners with only personal violence as a way of defending themselves, a system that affected both whites and blacks.

Montecristo No. 2

2011-07-17T21:38:00.002-04:00

From The Sports Curmudgeon

2011-06-20T23:59:00.002-04:00

I liked what he had to say today...

/////////

It is not often that one of our politicians says something that is insightful, analytical and accurate at the same time. Therefore, let me congratulate Governor Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii for these words on the subject of paying the NFL to hold the Pro Bowl game in Honolulu:

“You can’t do things like give 4 million bucks to a $9 billion football industry and not give any money to children. You’ve got this spectacle of these multimillionaires and billionaires out there arguing about how they’re going to divide it up, and then they come and ask us to bribe them with $4 million to have a scrimmage out here in paradise. We’ve got to get our values straight and our priorities straight.”

After he said that, someone challenged those remarks saying that the Pro Bowl attracted about 20,000 visitors as fans and generated lots more spending by those fans than $4M. The governor then got it right a second time when he said:

“Please. We’ll get more out of civil unions in a weekend then we’ll get out of those guys.”

Those Military Baggage Fees: Bad Journalism and Bad PR, Not Bad Ethics

2011-06-10T15:16:00.005-04:00

A right of center, (but typically right-on) blog that I visit fairly regularly posted this yesterday.

From : http://ethicsalarms.com/

"The 24 hour news cycle and blogger feeding frenzy often produce snap ethical
judgments that defy the facts, logic, and fairness. Today’s example: the
supposed “outrage” of Delta Air Lines making Army reservists returning from
combat in Afghanistan pay excess-bag fees. A Colorado soldier posted a YouTube
video complaining that their unit had to pay $2,800 for extra checked
bags, and you would have thought the airlines made the soldiers fly while
strapped to the wing. “You’re not going to believe this!” said “Fox and Friends”
goof Steve Doocy, introdoocying the story as if it was an act of domestic
terrorism. There were similar expressions of horror on CNN’s Headline News and
on the local news in Wilmington, Delaware, where I was staying yesterday while
doing a musical ethics program for the Wilmington Bar. And yet…
Delta did
nothing wrong or inappropriate."

I tend to agree.

Full Store here.

Pretty funny and sadly accurate commentary from TheSportsCurmudgeon.com

2011-02-03T17:14:00.001-05:00

January 20, 2009

Super Bowl Pageantry - - Life Imitates Art

Back in the 1960s, one of the great animated TV shows was Rocky and Bullwinkle; if you are too young to have seen those shows, you missed a lot. One of the features on that show was Mr. Peabody (a dog) and his sidekick Sherman (a boy) who used a time-travel device called The Wayback Machine to go back in history and to observe what "really happened" surrounding historical events.

Today, I want to take a trip in The Wayback Machine – not to look at the trappings of history but to try to show how a wonderful work of fiction in the past can portend reality in the present. I am going to set our version of The Wayback Machine to 1972 when Dan Jenkins first published his novel, Semi-Tough. If you are a sports fan and you have not read this book, you really need to do so. [Warning: The language in Semi-Tough is incredibly politically incorrect by today's standards; it was improper in polite company in the 1960s; I suspect it reflected the language of the locker-room in the 1960s rather well.] Dan Jenkins has been and continues to be an elite writer.

The premise of Semi-Tough is that one of the players on the NY Giants, Billy Clyde Puckett, is keeping a diary of the lead-up to a Super Bowl Game some time in the future that the Giants will play against the "dog-ass New York Jets". Part of that "diary" describes what the Giants' coach, Shoat Cooper, told his team to expect as part of the ceremonial pageantry accompanying the game. This was in 1972; this was fiction. Now look at Dan Jenkins' words, which I will liberally quote here, and ask yourself just how far from reality he was with his images:

"In the serious part of the squad meeting, Shoat Cooper explained to us what the drill would be for Sunday. In terms of what time everything would occur.

"Shoat said we would start getting our ankles taped at eight o'clock tomorrow morning. Those that needed special braces and pads taped on, he said, ought to get to the taping room thirty minutes early…

"He said we would leave for the Los Angeles Coliseum at about ten-thirty. It would be about eleven-fifteen when we got there, he said, and that would give us plenty of time. 'Time to get frisky for them piss ants,' he said.

"The kickoff wasn't until one-fifteen he pointed out. It had been set back fifteen minutes by CBS, he said, in order for the network to finish up a news special it was doing on some kind of earthquake that wiped out several hundred thousand chinks somewhere yesterday…

"Shoat said that both the offense and the defense would be introduced, on both teams, for television before the game. He said we should line up under the goal post that would be appointed to us and carry our hats under our arms when we trotted out to our own forty-five yardline and faced the dog-ass Jets and stood there for the 'Star Spangled Banner.'

"That would be the last thing we would do before kickoff, Shoat said…

"Shoat said we might have a long time to lay around the dressing room after we warmed up because the National Football League had a fairly lavish pregame show planned.

"Shoat said he understood that both the pregame show and the halftime show would have a patriotic flavor…

"According to Shoat, here's what was going to happen before the game:

"Several hundred trained birds – all painted red white and blue – would be released from cages somewhere and they would fly over the coliseum in the formation of an American flag.

"As the red, white and blue birds flew over, Boke Kellum, the Western TV star, would recite the Declaration of Independence.

"Next would be somebody dressed up like Mickey Mouse and somebody else dressed up like Donald Duck joining the actress Camille Virl in singing 'God Bless America.'

"And right in the middle of the singing, here would come this Air Force cargo plane to let loose fifty sky divers who would come dropping into the coliseum.

"Each sky diver would be dressed up in the regional costume of a state, and he would land in the coliseum in the order in which his state became a United State.

"When all this got cleaned up, Shoat said United States Senator Pete Rozelle, the ex-commissioner of the NFL who invented the Super Bowl, would be driven around the stadium in the car that won last year's Indianapolis 500. At the wheel would be Lt. Commander Flip Slammer, the fifteenth astronaut to walk on the moon.

"Riding along behind the Indy car, Shoat said, would be two men on horses. One would be Commissioner Bob Cameron on Lurking Funk, the thoroughbred which won last year's Kentucky Derby. And on the other horse, Podna (the horse Boke Kellum pretends to ride in his TV series), would be the current president of CBS, a guy named Woody Snyder.

"Finally, Shoat said, the teams would be introduced and two thousand crippled and maimed soldiers on crutches and in wheel chairs and on stretchers would render the 'Star Spangled Banner.'

"Shoat told us the halftime was likely to run forty-five minutes. It would be a long one at any rate, 'which might be a good thing if we got some scabs to heal up,' he said.

"The length of the halftime, Shoat said, would depend on whether CBS would decide to interrupt the Super Bowl telecast with a special news report on the earthquake, which might still be killing chinks with its fires and floods and tidal waves…

"Shoat said it was too bad we would have to miss it but the Super Bowl halftime show was going to be even more spectacular than the pregame show.

"He said there would be a water ballet in the world's largest inflatable swimming pool, a Spanish fiesta, a Hawaiian luau, a parade stressing the history of the armored tank, a sing-off between the glee clubs of all the military academies and an actual World War I dogfight in the sky with the Red Baron's plane getting blown to pieces.

"The final event of halftime, he said, an induction into the pro football hall of fame of about twenty stud hosses out of the past including our own Tucker Fredrickson, the vice president of DDD and F. United States Senator Pete Rozelle would preside, Shoat said, along with Camille Virl, the actress, and Jack Whitaker the CBS announcer. When the induction ceremony was over, Shoat said, then Rozelle, Whitaker and Camille Virl would lead the inductees in singing a parody on the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic' which was written by someone in the league office. The title of it, he said, was 'The Game Goes Marching On' and he understood it might make some people cry.

"Shoat said CBS hoped the whole stadium would join in the singing since all 92,000 people would have been given a printed copy of the lyrics.

"The last thing in the halftime would be some more birds. While the stadium was singing this song, Shoat said several thousand more painted up birds would be released and they would fly in such a way overhead that the likeness of Vince Lombardi, the great old coach, would appear."

In 1972, Dan Jenkins saw that the pomp and circumstance that was building over, under, around and through the Super Bowl would become a caricature of itself. When you view the pregame nonsense this year, think about those sky divers landing in the order that their state became a United State. Is that so outrageous given what you are seeing right there on your TV screen?

When the halftime silliness unfolds and you have about five thousand mouth-breathers clustered around a makeshift stage to listen to someone try to create music in a venue with atrocious acoustics, think about a parade stressing the history of the armored tank. Maybe the Super Bowl organizers might take a lesson from that idea for a stupid parade for next year's game instead of yet another irrelevant attempt to try to attach music to a football game.

In this case, it seems as if life is in the process of imitating art. It will not take too many more steps down the path of symbolic silliness for Super Bowl festivities to match this satirical picture. I do not know if Dan Jenkins had a sense of his prescience when he wrote those words in the early 1970s. But it sure is working out that way…

Once again, if you have not read Semi-Tough – or if you read it 25 years ago and have not thought of it since – I strongly urge you to get hold of a copy and read it again. It is definitely worth more than a few chuckles.

My copy of Semi-Tough is a reprint from 2006 by Thunder's Mouth Press. It is available from online booksellers.

But don't get me wrong, I love sports…

January 20th 2009

Sick Jokes of The Seventies

2010-10-17T14:46:00.001-04:00

The Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies....

2010-08-11T21:36:00.004-04:00

Nice appearance for Florence Henderson, no?

Story of my life..

2010-07-03T15:37:00.004-04:00

Bad Luck With Women...

Scotch & ice.

2010-06-22T21:54:00.000-04:00

Breaking Bad - "Everyone Knows It's Wendy"

2010-06-09T19:32:00.005-04:00

Saturday afternoon

2010-05-22T17:08:00.006-04:00

This is unedited, so all sounds are natural. Cars, airplanes, hammering, etc. But mostly, you'll hear birds.

La Gata

2010-05-20T00:17:00.001-04:00

Best Economist cover...Angela Merkel intoning "the Horror, The Horror"

2010-05-06T12:57:00.001-04:00

In remembrance of my father, RIP 4/20/1995

2010-04-20T20:47:00.003-04:00

Dad liked to use a beaker for a jigger, he would pour 60ml, but I went with 100.
Further, Dad would go with bourbon, but I'm going with scotch tonight.
Dissimilarities aside, the insulated tumbler shown below belonged to Dad and he sipped from it many times while watching the sunsets as depicted in the photo.

Here's to you Dad!

Publish Post

April 14th, tax returns are complete.

2010-04-17T13:57:00.000-04:00

Martinsville Monday

2010-04-01T23:56:00.004-04:00

The world famous Junior Johnson, "The last American Hero"

2010-03-28T21:18:00.004-04:00

Tom Wolfe declared Mr. Johnson "The Last American Hero.." in 1965.
The Allison brothers, Bobby & Donnie, were also around as was The King, Richard Petty.

Furthermore, from The Sports Curmudgeon...

2010-02-09T00:32:00.002-05:00

And I think he is right on in today's post:

After you have read all of the Super Bowl analysis on the sports pages of the nation this morning, you may still have some questions as to why the game turned out the way it did. As a public service, allow me to assist you in getting the answers you seek:
1. If you want to know why the Colts’ loss was the fault of the Bush Administration, tune in to Keith Olbermann’s show on MSNBC tonight. According to him, everything is the fault of the Bush Administration; therefore, he will surely be able to provide you with guidance there.
2. If you want to know why the Colts’ loss was the fault of the Obama Administration, tune in to Bill O’Reilly’s show on FOX News tonight. According to him, everything is the fault of the Obama Administration; therefore, he will surely be able to provide you with guidance there.

No need to thank me…

Revisiting the past...

2010-02-05T00:27:00.004-05:00

A couple of things...

A little more than a year ago I visited a local venue and predicted they would be closed within a year. They aren't. Based on some information from a friend, I called tonight and asked if they are certified as a cigar bar and the answer was "yes." I'll have to check it out and verify for myself, but if my information is correct , they will have earned back my business.

Also, a little more than year ago, I read a post by The Sports Curmudgeon. This post quoted liberally from 1972 novel Semi-Tough. Pretty funny stuff about fictitous Super Bowl pagentry, as noted below.

“In the serious part of the squad meeting, Shoat Cooper explained to us what the drill would be for Sunday. In terms of what time everything would occur.

“Shoat said we would start getting our ankles taped at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. Those that needed special braces and pads taped on, he said, ought to get to the taping room thirty minutes early…

“He said we would leave for the Los Angeles Coliseum at about ten-thirty. It would be about eleven-fifteen when we got there, he said, and that would give us plenty of time. ‘Time to get frisky for them piss ants,’ he said.

“The kickoff wasn’t until one-fifteen he pointed out. It had been set back fifteen minutes by CBS, he said, in order for the network to finish up a news special it was doing on some kind of earthquake that wiped out several hundred thousand chinks somewhere yesterday…

“Shoat said that both the offense and the defense would be introduced, on both teams, for television before the game. He said we should line up under the goal post that would be appointed to us and carry our hats under our arms when we trotted out to our own forty-five yardline and faced the dog-ass Jets and stood there for the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’

“That would be the last thing we would do before kickoff, Shoat said…

“Shoat said we might have a long time to lay around the dressing room after we warmed up because the National Football League had a fairly lavish pregame show planned.

“Shoat said he understood that both the pregame show and the halftime show would have a patriotic flavor…

“According to Shoat, here’s what was going to happen before the game:

“Several hundred trained birds – all painted red white and blue – would be released from cages somewhere and they would fly over the coliseum in the formation of an American flag.

“As the red, white and blue birds flew over, Boke Kellum, the Western TV star, would recite the Declaration of Independence.

“Next would be somebody dressed up like Mickey Mouse and somebody else dressed up like Donald Duck joining the actress Camille Virl in singing ‘God Bless America.’

“And right in the middle of the singing, here would come this Air Force cargo plane to let loose fifty sky divers who would come dropping into the coliseum.

“Each sky diver would be dressed up in the regional costume of a state, and he would land in the coliseum in the order in which his state became a United State.

“When all this got cleaned up, Shoat said United States Senator Pete Rozelle, the ex-commissioner of the NFL who invented the Super Bowl, would be driven around the stadium in the car that won last year’s Indianapolis 500. At the wheel would be Lt. Commander Flip Slammer, the fifteenth astronaut to walk on the moon.

“Riding along behind the Indy car, Shoat said, would be two men on horses. One would be Commissioner Bob Cameron on Lurking Funk, the thoroughbred which won last year’s Kentucky Derby. And on the other horse, Podna (the horse Boke Kellum pretends to ride in his TV series), would be the current president of CBS, a guy named Woody Snyder.

“Finally, Shoat said, the teams would be introduced and two thousand crippled and maimed soldiers on crutches and in wheel chairs and on stretchers would render the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’

“Shoat told us the halftime was likely to run forty-five minutes. It would be a long one at any rate, ‘which might be a good thing if we got some scabs to heal up,’ he said.

“The length of the halftime, Shoat said, would depend on whether CBS would decide to interrupt the Super Bowl telecast with a special news report on the earthquake, which might still be killing chinks with its fires and floods and tidal waves…

“Shoat said it was too bad we would have to miss it but the Super Bowl halftime show was going to be even more spectacular than the pregame show.

“He said there would be a water ballet in the world’s largest inflatable swimming pool, a Spanish fiesta, a Hawaiian luau, a parade stressing the history of the armored tank, a sing-off between the glee clubs of all the military academies and an actual World War I dogfight in the sky with the Red Baron’s plane getting blown to pieces.

“The final event of halftime, he said, an induction into the pro football hall of fame of about twenty stud hosses out of the past including our own Tucker Fredrickson, the vice president of DDD and F. United States Senator Pete Rozelle would preside, Shoat said, along with Camille Virl, the actress, and Jack Whitaker the CBS announcer. When the induction ceremony was over, Shoat said, then Rozelle, Whitaker and Camille Virl would lead the inductees in singing a parody on the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ which was written by someone in the league office. The title of it, he said, was ‘The Game Goes Marching On’ and he understood it might make some people cry.

“Shoat said CBS hoped the whole stadium would join in the singing since all 92,000 people would have been given a printed copy of the lyrics.

“The last thing in the halftime would be some more birds. While the stadium was singing this song, Shoat said several thousand more painted up birds would be released and they would fly in such a way overhead that the likeness of Vince Lombardi, the great old coach, would appear.”

Catcher in the Rye

2010-01-28T14:21:00.001-05:00

"Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules."
"Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it."
Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game, all right - I'll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it? Nothing. No game.

The ambition of Dale Earnhardt Sr.

2010-01-19T23:24:00.004-05:00

I saw this post on twitter tonight from Jeff Gluck regarding Dale Earnhardt Sr's NASCAR questionnaire back in 1975. The simplicity and single-mindedness of the responses pretty well define the man in an odd way.

According to @nascarhall, Dale Sr questionnaire from 1975 says he wrestled in HS, was living w/his mom, superstitious of green and peanuts.
Dale Sr answered question "what ambitions do you have other than racing" with underlined "None." #nascar @nascarhall
jeff_gluck

The Sports Curmudgeon weighs in on Kiffen

2010-01-14T15:23:00.001-05:00

When Lane Kiffen was 31 years old, he had never been a head coach at any level of football. Al Davis hired him to be the head coach of the Oakland Raiders at that point only to fire him abruptly in the midst of Kiffen's second season in Oakland. Adding that firing and a 5-15 record with the Raiders to his CV, Kiffen managed to become the head coach at Tennessee. There he lasted one year, had a 7-6 record and chalked up 4 NCAA "secondary violations". One of his violations involved the recruitment of a player who would have to be dismissed from the team during the season following a police arrest. Now, Lane Kiffen is the head football coach at USC. I think I know what comes next:

Lane Kiffen: Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.

But don't get him wrong, he loves sports!

New taste of the Lasanta

2010-01-09T14:13:00.005-05:00

No cigars since December 30th. At least I'm now able to guzzle scotch in the safety of a smoke-free environment.

Christmas Scotch Tasting

2009-12-27T22:08:00.003-05:00

Glenmorangie Lasanta

"Glenmorangie Lasanta is an elegant and full-bodied single malt whisky."

Pretty, pretty, pretty good.

Best of Luanne, featuring Brittany Murphy

2009-12-21T18:52:00.003-05:00

Snowfall in North Carolina

2009-12-18T20:25:00.006-05:00

From The Sports Curmudgeon - But don't get him wrong, he loves sports!

2009-12-10T10:59:00.002-05:00

Mythical Picks - NCAA - Weekend of 12/12/09

Hold your applause. Maintain your composure. This is going to be the last iteration of NCAA Mythical Picks for 2009. No one shall have to endure any of this any more - - - until at least next year…

The Wildcats of Linfield College defeated St. Thomas (Minn) 31-20 last weekend to advance to the semifinals of the NCAA Division III football championship tournament. This game was close; Linfield led by only 4 points late in the 3rd quarter but they pulled out a win. The last time Linfield made it to the Division III semifinals was in 2004. That was the year they also won the Division III national championship. This week Linfield goes on the road to play the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater; the winner of that game will go to the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl – the Division II championship game – in Salem, Virginia. The other bracket for the semifinal found pairs Mount Union (Oh) against Wesley (De). Wisconsin-Whitewater is 13-0 on the season and is the champion of the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference; Linfield is 12-0. Since 2005, Wisconsin-Whitewater has a cumulative record of 68-5 in football. I do not care what league you play in, that is a superb span of success. Good luck to all four of the remaining tournament participants - - nevertheless, Go Wildcats!

Here are some pluses and minuses from last week's Mythical Picks:

1. I liked Oregon State with 9.5 points against Oregon. Oregon State covered. Plus.

2. I liked Cincy/Pitt to go Under 58. They went over by more than 4 TDs. Minus.

3. I liked Pitt with 2 points against Cincy. They only lost by 1 point. Plus.

4. I liked Arizona plus 7 points against USC. Arizona won outright. Plus.

5. I liked Arizona/USC to go under 50 - - and said that the game might go Under 40. Final score was Arizona 21 USC 17. Double plus.

6. I liked Cal to win and cover 7 points against Washington. Cal lost outright. Minus.

7. I liked Alabama with 5.5 points against Florida. 'Bama won by 19 points. Plus.

8. I liked Alabama/Florida to go Over 41 even more than I liked 'Bama with the points. The game went Over. Plus.

9. I liked UConn to cover 7 points against USF. They did not. Minus.

10. I liked Texas/Nebraska to go over 41.5. It went Under by a mile. Minus.

11. I liked Clemson plus a point against Georgia Tech. Clemson lost by 5. Minus.

Even though there are a couple of seemingly prescient picks above, no one should be dumb enough to think that they would take any information here and use it to make a decision on what to bet relative to the only Division 1-A college football game this weekend. If you did that you would probably be dumb enough to think that a terminal illness is what you get in an airport after you order the nachos at one of the airport eateries.

General Comments:

This is the last of the NCAA – Mythical Picks for the simple reason that I would not wager on 90% of the bowl games unless my life and the lives of all my family members depended on me getting down on those games. Having said that, I do have more than a few comments/observations about the bowl game pairings that will fill up TV time this month and into the early parts of next month. Let me begin with comments about that sub-section of the college bowl games I call the WGARA Bowls - - standing for the Who Gives A Rat's Ass Bowls:

The New Mexico Bowl pairs Fresno State and Wyoming. I do not want to be overly fussy here and I acknowledge that Wyoming is much improved this year as compared to last year. Nonetheless, Wyoming is a less-than-awe-inspiring 6-6 coming into this game with the following losses on their dance card:

TCU 45 Wyoming 10
BYU 52 Wyoming 0
Colorado 24 Wyoming 0
Texas 41 Wyoming 10

The New Orleans Bowl brings together Southern Mississippi and Middle Tennessee. Not to put too fine a point on it here, but I did not give a fig about either team during the entirety of the regular college football season. Why should I give a damn now?

The Little Caesars Bowl will feature Marshall against Ohio University. Unless Edward G. Robinson and Douglass Fairbanks Jr. are reincarnated to serve as grand marshals of a parade at halftime, this game has no intrinsic interest whatsoever. Oh, and the game will be played in Detroit on the day after Christmas. Do you think I will be able to book a flight and a room for this one at the last minute…?

The Independence Bowl has Texas A&M facing Georgia. The game is in Shreveport, LA; nothing says "independence" to me like Shreveport, LA. This ought to be the Mediocrity Bowl. Here are two teams that were mediocre for the 2009 season and the reward for each of them is a mediocre opponent at a mediocre venue. I may have to miss this game. I think I have to review my auto insurance policy that day…

The Humanitarian Bowl sends Idaho up against Bowling Green. Be still my heart… Look, Bowling Green is at a significant disadvantage here; a bowling green is - - well - - green. And this field is going to be blue. How is that fair?

The Insight Bowl has Minnesota playing Iowa State. Minnesota is 6-6; one of those wins came at home by 3 points against South Dakota State. Iowa State is also 6-6; one of their wins came at home against North Dakota State. Will the winner here be the Dakota State Champion for 2009? Here are a few "Insights" for the people who might tune in:

One of these teams will end the season with a losing record.

This game is less than meaningless.

This game will be telecast on NFL Network. You would think the NFL has sufficient "stroke" in the football world to get a better game for their time and effort.

Given the limited access to NFL Network as compared to ESPN, this game may draw as many as hundreds of viewers…

The GMAC Bowl pairs Central Michigan and Troy on Jan 6 2010. For the sake of brevity, may I ask, "Why?"

January 2, 2010 may be the singular black hole of college football for the entire calendar year. Here are the games on that day:

UConn vs. South Carolina Ho-hum at best.

Ok State vs. Ole Miss Both underperformed expectations this year.

S. Florida vs. N. Illinois About as exciting as a PB&J sandwich.

E. Carolina vs. Arkansas Quick, name 4 players on either team…

Michigan St. vs. Texas Tech Mercifully, the last game of the day.

Lest anyone say that all I can do is to see the glass as half-empty, there are four minor bowl games that are worthy of attention and viewing:

The Capitol One Bowl pairs Penn State and LSU. Here are two good teams that will meet in a decent venue (Orlando, FL). This deserves attention.

The Las Vegas Bowl has BYU against Oregon State. Again, here are two much better than average teams. I do not know how much of a crowd they will draw playing 3 days before Christmas, but this should be an interesting game.

The Poinsettia Bowl features Utah and Cal. Once again, these are much better than average teams but they are consigned to play 2 days before Christmas. Whatever. This game is worth checking out.

The Sun Bowl drew Stanford and Oklahoma this year. The game is New Year's Eve starting at 2 PM EST. That means you have plenty of time to watch this game and get yourself showered and dressed in time for whatever you have planned for that evening. This game should be worth the time it takes to watch it.

Some folks are miffed that Boise State has been paired with TCU in one of the BCS Bowl Games. Those folks say that the BCS "cartel" - - to use Michael Wilbon's characterization - - did not want to allow either team to play and possibly beat one of the "big boys" in a BCS Game. Frankly, I like this matchup. Other than the Championship Game itself, compare TCU/Boise State with the other four BCS games; it really is the most interesting game of the bunch:

Iowa/Georgia Tech: Wake me when it's over.

Ok St/Ole Miss: See "Black Hole" discussion above.

Cincy/Florida: Good if you like bridesmaid-on-bridesmaid action.

Oregon/Ohio State: Do you really care who wins here?

The Iowa/Georgia Tech game in the Orange Bowl presents an interesting situation. The Big 10/ACC Challenge has been very successful in college basketball over the past several years. The Orange Bowl is a mini-version of the Big 10/ACC Challenge. And, the real challenge will be for that game to draw ratings that will beat a typical pro 'rassling show on cable TV. That game looks to be the pigskin-coated version of Ambien…

Oregon will play in the Rose Bowl this year. The only time Oregon won the Rose Bowl was in 1917 when they defeated the University of Pennsylvania. That's not Penn State; that's the Ivy League entry…

Temple will play in the Eagle Bank Bowl in Washington DC on Dec 29. If Army wins this weekend against Navy, Temple and Army will meet in that game. If Army loses, they will not be eligible for the bowl game and Temple will then face UCLA. There was a time when UCLA was a force majeure in college football; now they have to hope that they squeeze into a meaningless bowl game 3000 miles from home in a bad weather site in order to face Temple. Sic transit gloria mundi…

One more comment on the myriad upcoming bowl games; let me put this in the form of a Quick Quiz:

Which is more embarrassing for a school?

A. Dropping football because the school cannot afford it - - OR

B. Playing in the GMAC Bowl Game?

In other college football happenings, I want to make something as clear as I possibly can. I have no equivocation with regard to this position:

I DO NOT CARE who wins the Heisman Trophy.

I would not care if they decided not to make the award this year.

Does anyone here recall Beano Cook saying that Notre Dame could be playing for the BCS National Championship this year and that if they beat Michigan, they might wind up the season 11-1 - - the potential loss coming to USC? Do not rag on Beano because Lou Holtz also had Notre Dame as a participant in the BCS Championship Game. Well, the Irish went ZERO-for-November and now they are looking for a new coach…

Mark Mangino is out at Kansas amidst allegations that he verbally and emotionally abused his players over the time he was the head coach there. Former players and parents of players came together to say that Mangino was only a short distance removed from "monster status". The school cut ties with Mangino via a settlement. Let me assume for a moment that all of the allegations about Mangino are 100% true and that he abused his position of authority as a football coach. [I don't know that to be true and I don't really believe it to be absolutely true, but work with me here for a minute.] That brings up a very troubling situation:

Where were the cries of indignation and allegations of abuse against Mangino from former players and parents of former players and assistant coaches over the past several years while Kansas was having great success of the football field? Recall, Mangino was the national coach of the year just two seasons ago…

Chutzpah is a great Yiddish word. It conveys the sense of outrageous audacity and unbelievable gall. If there were a college football award for chutzpah, this year's winner would have to be Georgia coach, Mark Richt. The Georgia defense has been less than good this year; there is no way to sugar coat that. Richt fired the Bulldogs' defensive coordinator, the linebackers' coach and the defensive ends' coach right after the final game of the season. Then came the chutzpah… He asked all three of the coaches he just fired to stay on and coach the team through Georgia's meaningless bowl game against Texas A&M on Dec 28. He fired them and then asked them to give up Christmas with their families so that they could continue to be less-than-satisfactory coaches. I know what I would tell him to do with his bowl game…

The Ponderosas:

There were two Ponderosa spread games last week. Boise State did not cover; La Tech covered. The week was 1-1 for the favorites covering. That makes the season total for 2009 36-38 for the favorites covering.

There are no Ponderosa spread games this week.

The Game of Interest:

Army vs. Navy – 14.5 (41.5): Army needs this win to go to the Eagle Bank Bowl; if they lose, they are done for the year. Nonetheless, Army is not nearly as good as Navy; four of the five wins for Army came against abjectly dreadful teams this year. The game is always worth watching so I would urge you to tune in to see football played with all of the hustle and heart that you could ever want in a game. However, if I HAD to wager on the game, I think I'd take it to go Under.

But don't get me wrong, I love sports…

The infectious puerile boogie of The Fairlanes variety

2009-12-08T23:57:00.002-05:00

Every second Tuesday at Fisher's.

Not as luscious as the last, but nice nonetheless

2009-11-28T16:14:00.002-05:00

A luscious picture.

2009-11-27T01:47:00.001-05:00

Excerpt from Peggy Noonan's November 7th column.

2009-11-11T10:27:00.002-05:00

All White House staffs tend to hypnotize themselves into thinking their greatest asset is the president. George W. Bush's people thought this way too—the guy is magic, associate yourself with him and you'll win big. That's what they told candidates in 2006, when Mr. Bush dragged them down. Most modern White House staffs, no matter who the president, wind up at a point where they're like the men around Stalin. Stalin would give a speech, and his commissars would all wildly applaud. The applause would go on a long time, but it had to end at some point, so Vladimir sitting up front would, in an attempt to be helpful, stop applauding and sit down. Everyone else would follow. The next week Stalin would give a speech and everything would be the same except Vladimir was no longer in the front row. He was in the Gulag. This is how White House staffs come to think: Never be the first one to stop applauding.

Don't Worry

2009-11-11T00:35:00.002-05:00

Courtesy of Mr. Curtis Mayfield

(Don't Worry) If There's A Hell Below We're All Gonna Go

Sisters, Brothers And The Whities
Blacks And The Crackers
Police And Their Backers
They're All Political Actors

Hurry, People Running From Their Worries
While The Judge And His Juries
Dictate The Law That's Partly Flaw.
Cat Calling Love Balling Fussing And Cussing

Top Billing Now Is Killing
For Peace No One Is Willing
Kind Of Make You Get That Feeling

Everybody Smoke
Use The Pill And The Dope
Educated Fools
From-Uneducated Schools

Pimping People Is The Rule
Polluted Water In The Pool

And Nixon Talking About Don't Worry
He Says Don't Worry
He Says Don't Worry
He Says Don't Worry

But They Don't Know There Can Be No Show
And If There's A Hell Below We're All Gonna Go
Everybody's Praying And Everybody's Saying
But When Come Time To Do
Everybody's Laying

Just Talking About Don't Worry
They Say Don't Worry
They Say Don't Worry
They Say Don't Worry

Sisters, Brothers And The Whitie
Blacks And The Crackers
Stone Stone Junkie
Police And Their Backers
They're All Political Actors

Smoke, The Pill And The Dope,
Educated Fools From Uneducated Schools,
Pimping People Is The Rule
Polluted Water In The Pool

And Everybody's Saying Don't Worry
They Say Don't Worry
They Say Don't Worry
They Say Don't Worry

But They Don't Know
There Can Be No Show
If There's A Hell Below
We're All Gonna Go

Lord What We Gonna Do
If Everything I Say Is True
This Ain't No Way It Ought To Be
1f Only All The Mass Could See

But Everybody Keeps Saying Don't Worry

1970 Curtom Publishing (Bmi)
Original Americsn Recordings By Buddah-Records

The Macallan Cask Strength

2009-11-01T21:39:00.003-05:00

Luscious stuff indeed. All of it.

Martinsville Pics

2009-10-26T19:19:00.015-04:00

The eventual winner

After following some surprisingly nasty discourse...

2009-10-13T20:02:00.002-04:00

..on a facebook post, I was reminded of this scene from one of my favorite movies.
If you really want to be nasty, this is a good example.

A Love Supreme

2009-09-23T21:41:00.005-04:00

Today would have been John Coltrane's 83rd birthday.
I titled this post as I did simply because that's a really cool song composed by Trane.
The song below is actually a Duke Ellington song that 'Trane did. I've posted it because it is so hauntingly lyrical and beautiful. According to Wikipedia, (an important caveat, I suppose) In a Sentimental Mood was composed in Durham, NC.

John Coltrane was born in Hamlet, NC and grew up in High Point, NC. He left and never returned as far as I know. The photo shown is of a statue in High Point.

Wine & Dine Wednesday...not

2009-09-16T16:09:00.003-04:00

OK, so last Wednesday, I'm at Village Tavern where they have a regular "Wine and Dine Wednesday" promotion that features ½ price wines by the glass. The ½ price wine is not the reason I'm there because I generally stick to guzzling hard liquor like a man that "likes to get drunk quick" (ala "it's a wonderful life"), but the promotion tends to be a pretty big draw for other folks. It's typically a noisy and what I would call "vulgar" crowd.

Anyway, to get to my point, I 'm sitting at the bar sipping a scotch whiskey and this guy comes up beside me and starts talking to me, trying to make a point that he got drunk for just $13.50. I doubt that I was looking particularly impressed with this revelation when the guy pauses from a minute, looks at me and asks:

"Are you Jewish?"

At this point, I lift my glass from the bar, take a sip of my scotch, return the glass to the bar, look at the guy and reply: "Technically, no."

The fellow looks at me with a somewhat confused countenance and replies:

"Whaddya mean? Yeah you are, right? you're Jewish!"

I look back at the fellow and calmly say, "Technically, no. I'm of Scotch-Irish ancestry and was raised as an Episcopalian. However, as Brendan Behan noted 'Other people have a nationality, the Irish and the Jews have a psychosis' "

The guy looks more confused and blubbers "I'm Irish, what the hell's that supposed to mean?"

I told him, "I don't know, Brendan Behan said it. He was a famous Irish playright. Maybe it's about the guilt."

The guy says "Who said that? How do you spell it?" and starts looking for a pen to write it down as I slowly spelled the name for him. I never thought to ask why he inquired of my ethnic origins to begin with, but I'm sure it doesn't matter.

Someone at the same restaurant asked the same question of a co-worker and me a few months ago. It's a little puzzling, and although, again, it doesn't matter, I don't think that I'll be going back there for Wine and Dine Wednesday specifically. I prefer a quieter, less raucous clientele that is more conducive to my brooding.

The problem is today that folks seem to be afraid that if they aren't being loud and obnoxious, somebody may think they aren't having a good time.

Wake-Baylor Game

2009-09-08T16:14:00.006-04:00

I was trying my best for photos of gridiron action, but this silly girl kept getting in my pictures.

Reagan's 1980 "Prelude to Victory" Party

2009-09-02T14:13:00.001-04:00

Reagan's 1980 "Prelude to Victory" Party - Fashion and Design News and Trends - WWD.com

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Final August entry.

2009-08-31T22:26:00.003-04:00

Walking on Velvet Green. A nice song.
(I'll post a nicer Ian Anderson song tomorrow )

Walking on Velvet Green - Scots Pine growing.
Isn't it rare to be taking the air, sinning -
Walking on Velvet Green.

Walking on Velvet Green - distant cows lowing.
Never a care; with your legs in the air, loving -
Walking on Velvet Green.

Won't you have my company, yes, take it in your hands.
Go down on Velvet Green, with a country-man.
Who's a young girl's fancy and an old maid's dream.
Tell your mother that you walked all night on Velvet Green.

One dusky half-hour's ride up to the north.
There lies your reputation and all that you're worth.
Where the scent of wild roses turns the milk to cream.
Tell your mother that you walked all night on Velvet Green.

And the long grass blows in the evening cool.
And August's rare delight may be April's fool.
But think not of that my love, I'm tight against the seam.
And I'm growing up to meet you down on Velvet Green.

Now I may tell you that it's love and not just lust.
And if we live the lie, let's lie in trust.
On golden daffodils, to catch the silver stream
That washes out the wild oat seed on Velvet Green.

We'll dream as lovers under the stars:
Of civilizations raging afar.
And the ragged dawn breaks on your battle scars
As you walk home cold and alone upon Velvet Green.

Walking on Velvet Green - Scots Pine growing.
Isn't it rare to be taking the air, sinning -
Walking on Velvet Green.

Walking on Velvet Green - distant cows lowing.
Never a care; with your legs in the air, loving -
Walking on Velvet Green.

Gene Owen's column.

2009-08-31T17:38:00.003-04:00

They are all good, but I especially liked this one.

Traveling to Texas with a dog

By Gene Owens

"He travels fastest who travels alone," wrote Rudyard Kipling, and the old boy's right. But traveling with a dog slows you down only a tad, and the company's worth the extra minutes.

Since Miss Peggy was minding our grandson Chase in Georgia and I was overdue a visit to my son Matt on South Padre Island, Texas, I decided to take advantage of her absence to drive to the Mexican border. My great-grandson, Kaiden, was 5 months old and I hadn't seen him.

"You're not driving down there!" said Miss Peggy. The assumption is that a 72-year-old man can't find his way across six states, even with a GPS to guide him.

"I'm not flying," I told her. I've never felt comfortable in the air, and the Hassle of air travel, connecting flights, baggage claims, and car rentals negates for me the advantage of jet speed. I prefer to stay on the ground, faithful dog beside me, a rest area every 35 miles and a McDonald's, Hardee's, Burger King or Shoney's at every third or fourth exit.

I planned to stop overnight going and coming in Mobile, Ala., with daughter Cherie and her husband, Joe. Mapquest.com told me it would take me 13 hours to drive from Mobile to South Padre Island. I figured that 13 hours behind the wheel was no more exhausting than 13 hours in front of a computer screen, and I've pulled that off many times.

Miss Candi, my 14-year-old Peke-a-poo, would be my travel companion. I broke her in to car travel when she was just a few weeks old, and she accompanied me on many a trip around the state of Alabama when I worked for the Mobile Press-Register. Arthritis now makes her accustomed perch atop my shoulder uncomfortable, so I outfitted my Toyota Matrix for her comfort.

The back seats folded down to form a flat floor, and I placed her bed on it. I spread out a blanket and put her food dish and a water dish on it. She has a cushion to smooth her way across the console when she wants to move from the shotgun seat to my lap. And she could curl up for a nap in her own bed whenever she liked. We packed a supply of her favorite dog food in her travel bag, but she also got a ham biscuit whenever I stopped for breakfast. I would go through the drive-through and order my meal and hers. Then I would stop in the parking lot and we would share breakfast. She would eat the ham and I would dunk the biscuit in my coffee.

Traveling with a dog is different from traveling with a wife. The dog never wants to stop at an outlet mall, never has to pick up emergency supplies from Salley's, never wants to listen to Streisand when I prefer Old Hank. She's just as happy at Hardee's as she is at Applebee's, where the food is fancier but the service is slower.

As I traveled across east Texas, I stopped for Texas barbecue in a town called Refugio, and ate in a hole-in-the-wall in a rundown strip mall that I wouldn't have taken Miss Peggy into. The ribs were good, even if they were taken from an animal that said moo"instead of one that said "oink." And I could go home and tell people that I ate in the town that gave the world Nolan Ryan. It says so on a sign at city limits. The only thing Nolan Ryan and I have in common is arthritis, but it felt good breathing the air that a Hall-of-Fame pitcher had breathed. By 10 p.m. I was pulling up to the LaQuinta Inn in Brownsville, where I knew from past experience that my 10-pound dog would be welcome.

I hooked up my GPS and let Gypsy direct me to Matt's front door. Gypsy is the synthesized woman's voice that comes out of the pathfinding instrument. She spends a lot of time telling me to make a U-turn at my earliest convenience, because I often ignore her directions.

I spent a couple of days with the kids, took them to Brownsville's zoo, ate seafood near the mouth of the Rio Grande, had a Presidente margarita at Chili's (they don't make them better in the local joints), and allowed Candi to bask in the attention of my grandchildren.

On Monday, I turned in early, determined to hit the road the first time I woke up. I awoke at 2 a.m., after six hours of sleep. I roused Candi, and headed for home. The Border Patrol stopped me between Brownsville and Corpus to allow its dogs to sniff my car. Candi tolerated them without a growl.

I spent the morning ignoring Gypsy's admonition to "execute a U-turn as soon as possible." Texas had built some new highways around Corpus and she didn't recognize them. I knew I was returning the way I had come. Somewhere before I reached Victoria, she figured out where I was and directed me on a route that allowed me to slide through Houston on I-10 without a single jam. I regretfully bypassed the town that advertised "the biggest squirrel in Texas." I was afraid it would take me for the biggest nut in Texas and Candi would be stranded a thousand miles from home with no driver.

I got back to Anderson ready for a good night's sleep and a weekend in North Carolina with Miss Peggy.

The pace may have been slower than it would have been aboard Delta. But my baggage got home the same time I did. I didn't have to put my dog in a kennel. I didn't have to pay an exorbitant fee for parking my car at the airport and I didn't have to rent a car to drive around the Brownsville area.

I still hate flying.

(Readers may write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625, or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@aol.com)

Miscellanous

2009-08-24T23:20:00.003-04:00

I watched a couple of movies over the weekend.

Sex and The City
Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia

I enjoyed them both although on different levels as one might expect.

One thing that I thought was a little different was that Al Garcia featured a few different themes. One that I thought was maybe a little different for the time (1974) was the inclusion of the gay, dispassionate, suit-wearing hit men as characters. As I recall, back in the day, gay movie characters were fairly stereotypical. It took a few scenes for me to catch on.

Anyway, more later perhaps.

Can't say why this came to mind...

2009-08-18T19:13:00.003-04:00

...just thirty minutes ago.

....

A junkie walking through the twilight
I'm on my way home
I left three days ago, but no one seems to know i'm gone
Home is where the hatred is
Home is filled with pain and it,
might not be such a bad idea if i never, never went home again

Stand as far away from me as you can and ask me why
Hang on to your rosary beads
Close your eyes to watch me die
You keep saying, kick it, quit it, kick it, quit it
God, but did you ever try
To turn your sick soul inside out
So that the world, so that the world
Can watch you die

Home is where i live inside my white powder dreams
Home was once an empty vacuum that's filled now with my silent screams
Home is where the needle marks
Try to heal my broken heart
and it might not be such a bad idea if i never, if i never went home again
Home again
Home again
Home again
Kick it, quit it
Kick it, quit it
Kick it, quit it
Kick it, can't go home again.

Another version

WWD's 1969 Coverage of Woodstock: A Weekend Trip - WWD.com

2009-08-18T16:35:00.002-04:00

WWD's 1969 Coverage of Woodstock: A Weekend Trip - WWD.com

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Rick Pitino - "He's Our Guy"

2009-08-16T14:35:00.002-04:00

I think this AP column hits the nail on the head pretty well.

To quote The Sports Curmudgeon, Don’t Get Me Wrong, I Love Sports…

////////////////////////

... lot of lessons to be learned from the lurid revelations about Rick Pitino, not the least of which are that moral depravity and dishonesty may not mean what you think and that the president of the University of Louisville should be a little more careful in choosing his words.
...A coach is only as great as the assistants underneath who work for him.
Vinnie Tatum was such a good soldier that he kept guard over Pitino in the back of a restaurant even as the coach was having drunken sex with a woman he had met just hours earlier....
....latest word from Pitino's lawyer is that the basketball coach was simply so concerned Karen Sypher had no health insurance that he reached into his pocket for a wad of bills to pay for it. Sypher was apparently posted upstairs at the clandestine rendezvous to make sure Pitino got a receipt for his largesse.
.....If only every rich person in America were as generous as Pitino, there would be no need for President Obama to campaign for health care reform.
None of this seems to particularly bother the people in charge at Louisville, ....hiding from questions about a hugely popular coach who went 31-6 last season and came within one game of the Final Four. The athletic director ... praising Pitino for being truthful, while president James Ramsey said only that some details of the whole sordid mess were "surprising."
Disgusting would be a more accurate description, but, hey, Pitino wins games and lots of them. No reason to jeopardize that, especially now that archrival Kentucky has its own superstar coach.
...Winning basketball games is a lot more important than taking the high moral ground at most universities.
Pitino said Wednesday he was at Louisville "as long as they will have me" and ... that figures to be as long as he keeps winning.
Yet he's drunk in a restaurant having sex with a woman he just met while his assistant listens in? He's giving her money in a secret meeting at another assistant's place after she tells him she's pregnant with his baby and plans to get an abortion?
Say what you will about Bobby Knight, but this wouldn't happen on his watch. He might throw a few chairs in a restaurant, but he wouldn't be having sex on top of one.

Vladimir Putin enjoys Russian nature like a real man

2009-08-06T18:15:00.002-04:00

Life imitates The Onion.
I kid you not, this headline is directly from Pravda.

Also featured, Two Russian Nuclear Submarines Make USA Shake With Fear

Pretty funny Sports Curmudgeon yesterday.

2009-08-04T18:48:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, August 3rd, The Sports Curmudgeon placed his first post since July 6th, when he departed for an African photo safari.

So, his first post on his return concerned all the events he discovered he had "missed" while traveling. A few are listed below:

The Tour de France started and ended without once coming to my attention. That’s good!

The baseball All-Star Game and the idiotic Home-Run Derby happened without my knowing about it. No problem here…

I missed out on the spasm that occurred when the rumor spread that Pete Rose might be reinstated by MLB thereby making him eligible for induction into the Hall of Fame. [Aside: Maybe if Pete Rose admitted to using steroids he would have the support of a bunch of writers who seem to believe that it was baseball’s fault for not catching those guys earlier on and so all their records should carry them into the HoF…]

I went 24 consecutive days without hearing the name “Brett Favre” mentioned a single time. Didn’t miss it even a little bit.

Even the Michael Jackson whoop-dee-doo never made it to the tented camps on or next to the African game parks. Praise the Lord for that.

I think I recall something known as the WNBA but I will have to Google it to refresh my memory.

I missed the furor surrounding “The Erin Andrews Tape”. For the record, if Erin Andrews chose to post a photo or a videotape of hersef getting dressed in a hotel room, she should have the right to do so. However, the voyeurs who schemed to make that tape clandestinely and then to “publish” it are antediluvian pond scum.

I missed Tom Watson – at age 59 and with an artificial hip – almost winning the British Open. Tell me again how you have to be a great athlete to play golf…

I missed the shock and awe that seemed to overcome most of the sports scribes as Tiger Woods disappeared from the British Open field.

Mobile Pictures

2009-07-25T23:31:00.011-04:00

Tree at All Saints. My HOA would have cut this down years ago.

I was actually in this photo taken 4/13/1986. Don't recognize myself though.

View from Traders.

Going into Fairhope.

A view from the Bayway

Bankhead Tunnel

The Riverview

Friday afternoon traffic

The trees are beautiful

Down in LA for a few days.

2009-07-23T18:50:00.002-04:00

I'll try to post some pics and observations later.

First observation: Airport Blvd in Mobile is a bleeding hemmorage of an abortion. If the city doesn't have a traffic engineer, they should hire one. If they do have a traffic engineer, maybe they should find a different one.

One toke over the line, sweet Jesus...

2009-07-21T21:57:00.001-04:00

This one's too good to miss.

Also, commentary re: GM

2009-07-18T14:25:00.003-04:00

From Eric Felten's De Gustibus column yesterday

.....

With General Motors fresh out of bankruptcy, veteran GM exec Robert A. Lutz took to the Internet this week to do some crotchety cheerleading in a chat at the company's Web site. One questioner had the temerity to write: "In my group it is just uncool to drive a GM car -- even if they are as good as the imports." He asked Mr. Lutz how he planned to turn that attitude around.

"I guess it depends whether you have your own personality or whether you are a lemming-like follower of current trends," Mr. Lutz grouched. "I think an audacious and bold person with a mind of his or her own would go to a dealership and see that our new vehicles easily trounce the foreign competition. . . . It's uncool to drive an import." Some salesmanship.
.....
The sad little South Korean Daewoo subcompact that Chevy markets as the Aveo is slated to be replaced in 2011 with the Chevy Spark, another Korean product. The Spark has the hyperactive angularity common to small Asian autos. What, other than that nervous grin of a grill, makes the car a Chevrolet? Where's the "Heartbeat of America"?
......
What an irony for GM, a company that made its bones by selling cars with better looks than its competitors. In 1926, GM honcho Alfred P. Sloan wrote to the head of the Buick division to emphasize "how much appearance has to do with sales; with all cars fairly good mechanically it is a dominating proposition and in a product such as ours where the individual appeal is so great, it means a tremendous influence on our future prosperity." GM keeps saying that it has rediscovered the joys of being good mechanically, but the appearance part of the old Sloan equation still eludes them.
.....

Excerpt from Peggy's column

2009-07-18T14:19:00.003-04:00

I'd say, pretty much, spot on.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124777884829553723.html

<<<<<< >>>>>>

The Sotomayor hearings were unsatisfying and relatively unilluminating. She was moderate in tone and manner, said little, will be confirmed, and over the years, decision by decision, we will find out who she is and how she thinks. They're all a mystery going in and then, paradoxically, cover themselves in a long black robe and reveal themselves. The Republicans questioning her never seemed to gain purchase, never quite succeeded in making the interesting (the Ricci case) interesting. Looking at things shallowly, and let's, Sonia Sotomayor seemed weirdly overrehearsed, speaking v e r y s l o w l y, gesturing with her hands in a way that was no doubt supposed to look natural and warm, like grandma in the kitchen, but instead came across as artificial and mildly animatronic.

Associated Press
Sonia Sotomayor

She took refuge (as did some of her questioners) in the impenetrable language of the law, and in what seemed (and this is becoming a regular strategy in politics) to be the deliberate jumbling of syntax, so people at home won't be able to follow what is being said. To be clear and succinct is to look for trouble. Better to produce a mist and miasma of jumbly words, and sentences that do not hold. You're talking, so you'll seem alive—in fact people using the syntax dodge are often quite animated—but as to meaning, you can leave that to the TV producers, who'll wrestle around trying to get something that makes sense and then settle for the Perry Mason soundbite. (Well, in truth the Perry Mason soundbite is pretty much what they want.)

I suspect the hearings added to a general sense of Washington's surface comity and essential sketchiness.

Simple pleasures

2009-07-14T22:10:00.002-04:00

A night time view from the stoop.

life imitates science fiction

2009-07-09T20:14:00.008-04:00

Saw a photo from John Paul Gaultier's couture show yesterday.

The model had all this dark mask looking eye makeup on.

I was immediately reminded of Pris, the Daryl Hannah character, in the 1982 film Blade Runner

I've... seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhausser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die.

/////////////////////

Pris

Played by: Daryl Hannah

Replicant

INCEPT DATE: 14 Feb, 2016
FUNCTION: Military/leisure
PHYS: A
MENT: B

To have and to have not...

2009-07-07T23:38:00.004-04:00

Not my composition, but I came across this tonight and I've always liked these lines.
Looks like it's more "have" than "have not."

Living a little, laughing a little.

2009-07-04T13:28:00.009-04:00

The opinion piece from yesterday's WSJ resonates with me somewhat.
I urge you to read the article in full, it's short and worth reading.

Primarily, the big hub-bub over Mark Sanford's indiscretions (or betrayal of his sacred marriage vows, if you choose) was a well placed kick to an opponent that was down, hoist by his own petard as a "family values" guy. Other than that, it is just sport, in which I, too, have participated. Generally speaking, I don't care much for these Whiskey Tango, holier than thou, family values types.

But as usual, again, this time, it kind of reminds me of a song which is excerpted below:

Laugh everyone at the fool with his heart in his hand
Still, he can't quite understand that he's less than a man
Lost somewhere deep in his shell, there's an ember of pride
Watch how he tries hard to hide that he's dyin' inside

Laugh at his comical tears, as he thinks of the years…

Living just a little
Laughing just a little
Ain't easy

Lyrics by Linda Creed

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OPINION: TASTE
JULY 3, 2009

Our Pryin' Eyes

By JENNIFER GRAHAM

Back when we all thought Mark Sanford was channeling Thoreau on the Appalachian Trail, The State newspaper reported that a 23-year-old South Carolinian had been arrested for peering in a woman's apartment on three consecutive nights. He was charged, police said, with "peeping and trespassing."

Later that day, in a glorious stroke of irony, the newspaper engaged in a little peeping and trespassing of its own, splaying the South Carolina governor's personal emails across the Internet, and, in the process, making perpetrators out of us all.

We spied on Mr. Sanford (a public figure) and his paramour (not), just as we peered in the ambulance as Michael Jackson died, just as we thumbed through his autopsy records, just as we look up our neighbors' home prices on Zillow.

Forget swine flu; we have a Peeping Tom pandemic.

The moniker is centuries old. It comes from the story of Lady Godiva, the English noblewoman who, according to legend, agreed to ride naked through the streets of Coventry in the interest of tax relief. While most citizens shut their windows and averted their eyes, a fellow named Tom succumbed to prurience and bored holes in his shutters so he could watch.

The original Peeping Tom at least had enough dignity to gape covertly. Modern-day voyeurs, many of whom appear on cable TV, just throw wide the shutters and leer. And they've had plenty to leer at of late.

Consider The State's beautifully choreographed document dump; the newspaper dribbled out a few tantalizing excerpts June 24, so we'd return the next day for the rest. According to Editor & Publisher, which covers the industry, the newspaper's Web site had the most traffic ever: 1.7 million views the day the emails hit.

Great marketing. Cheesy journalism. And I say this as a former reporter for The State.

Executive Editor Mark Lett defended the mass voyeurism as an exercise in democracy. "Some of the e-mail content is messy and unpleasant, to be sure. But in the end, we chose to publish the e-mails rather than deny citizens information about a man they twice chose to guide the state," Mr. Lett wrote, thus invoking journalism's sacredest of cows, the reader's "right to know."

Surveying recent coverage, we may assume that a rental-car agent in Pamplico, S.C., has the right -- yea, the need -- to know about an Argentine woman's tan lines, the contents of a dead singer's stomach, or the minutiae of anyone's divorce. Clever wordsmiths can justify any revelation, no matter how embarrassing or trite. But newspapers ignore the human cost at their own risk.

When I was a religion reporter for The State, I wrote a lengthy profile of a new pastor at a prominent church. I was nearly finished when I happened to scan the week's property transactions and spotted the price of the pastor's new home. It was far beyond what most journalists could afford.

I idly mentioned this to an editor, and he insisted I include the price in my article. I balked. I thought it too personal and invasive; this was long before Zillow.

No matter: I was overruled by many layers of editors who explained the importance of a pastor's home value and how an exceedingly personal detail was the business of the masses. I was young and needed my job; there was nothing I could do, save resign. So I added the information to my story and called the pastor to warn him. He was, not surprisingly, angry and avoided me for years. And for what? Who was helped by that detail, save the local gossip mill? And will The State's paid circulation rise because of the love letters it published last week?

Newspapers are in decline because of the Internet, but there are few mourners outside of their newsrooms. Too many smart and decent people have had their "Absence of Malice" moments: mornings when they opened their newspapers and saw something written about them that made them want to run through the neighborhood, picking up every newspaper they saw.

Jay Severin is a radio talk-show host in Boston who was recently suspended for incendiary remarks. He once mooed at a female caller who made the mistake of telling him her weight, and he said Mexico's leading exports were women with mustaches and venereal disease. But Mr. Severin said that not only would he not read Mr. Sanford's emails on the air -- as many of his colleagues have done -- but he would not read them himself.

Hear, hear. Offered a look out the peephole, at least one man deliberately averted his eyes.

And the original Peeping Tom? He was, according to legend, struck dead for his crime. Purveyors of peeping, take note.

Ms. Graham is a writer in the suburbs of Boston.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W11

What Hair Is This?

2009-06-29T19:24:00.006-04:00

Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat,....yeah, that's it, A CAT!

Remembrance of posts past

2009-06-28T14:10:00.003-04:00

Posted in January, 2008

Negro Y Azul

2009-06-27T14:59:00.002-04:00

The Iranian Election and the Revolution Test

2009-06-24T23:03:00.008-04:00

It's contrary to public opinion, but interesting commentary from a prestigious think tank.
Bottom line is, they do not believe that the Iranian election protests have overwhelmingly popular support, nor do they believe that voter fraud altered the election results.

They tell us:

Revolutions fail when no one joins the initial segment, meaning the initial demonstrators are the ones who find themselves socially isolated.

And then:

We continue to believe two things: that vote fraud occurred, and that Ahmadinejad likely would have won without it. Very little direct evidence has emerged to establish vote fraud, but several things seem suspect.

However, I reference Guevara's Guerrilla Warfare where he states in the second paragraph of chapter one:

It is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them.

Whatever... The more contemporary commentary, posted in it's entirety below, still makes a good case for the contrary.

/////////////////////////////
Source: Stratfor.com

The Iranian Election and the Revolution Test

June 22, 2009 | 1840 GMT

By George Friedman

Successful revolutions have three phases. First, a strategically located single or limited segment of society begins vocally to express resentment, asserting itself in the streets of a major city, usually the capital. This segment is joined by other segments in the city and by segments elsewhere as the demonstration spreads to other cities and becomes more assertive, disruptive and potentially violent. As resistance to the regime spreads, the regime deploys its military and security forces. These forces, drawn from resisting social segments and isolated from the rest of society, turn on the regime, and stop following the regime’s orders. This is what happened to the Shah of Iran in 1979; it is also what happened in Russia in 1917 or in Romania in 1989.

Revolutions fail when no one joins the initial segment, meaning the initial demonstrators are the ones who find themselves socially isolated. When the demonstrations do not spread to other cities, the demonstrations either peter out or the regime brings in the security and military forces — who remain loyal to the regime and frequently personally hostile to the demonstrators — and use force to suppress the rising to the extent necessary. This is what happened in Tiananmen Square in China: The students who rose up were not joined by others. Military forces who were not only loyal to the regime but hostile to the students were brought in, and the students were crushed.

A Question of Support

This is also what happened in Iran this week. The global media, obsessively focused on the initial demonstrators — who were supporters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s opponents — failed to notice that while large, the demonstrations primarily consisted of the same type of people demonstrating. Amid the breathless reporting on the demonstrations, reporters failed to notice that the uprising was not spreading to other classes and to other areas. In constantly interviewing English-speaking demonstrators, they failed to note just how many of the demonstrators spoke English and had smartphones. The media thus did not recognize these as the signs of a failing revolution.

Later, when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke Friday and called out the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, they failed to understand that the troops — definitely not drawn from what we might call the “Twittering classes,” would remain loyal to the regime for ideological and social reasons. The troops had about as much sympathy for the demonstrators as a small-town boy from Alabama might have for a Harvard postdoc. Failing to understand the social tensions in Iran, the reporters deluded themselves into thinking they were witnessing a general uprising. But this was not St. Petersburg in 1917 or Bucharest in 1989 — it was Tiananmen Square.

In the global discussion last week outside Iran, there was a great deal of confusion about basic facts. For example, it is said that the urban-rural distinction in Iran is not critical any longer because according to the United Nations, 68 percent of Iranians are urbanized. This is an important point because it implies Iran is homogeneous and the demonstrators representative of the country. The problem is the Iranian definition of urban — and this is quite common around the world — includes very small communities (some with only a few thousand people) as “urban.” But the social difference between someone living in a town with 10,000 people and someone living in Tehran is the difference between someone living in Bastrop, Texas and someone living in New York. We can assure you that that difference is not only vast, but that most of the good people of Bastrop and the fine people of New York would probably not see the world the same way. The failure to understand the dramatic diversity of Iranian society led observers to assume that students at Iran’s elite university somehow spoke for the rest of the country.

Tehran proper has about 8 million inhabitants; its suburbs bring it to about 13 million people out of Iran’s total population of 70.5 million. Tehran accounts for about 20 percent of Iran, but as we know, the cab driver and the construction worker are not socially linked to students at elite universities. There are six cities with populations between 1 million and 2.4 million people and 11 with populations of about 500,000. Including Tehran proper, 15.5 million people live in cities with more than 1 million and 19.7 million in cities greater than 500,000. Iran has 80 cities with more than 100,000. But given that Waco, Texas, has more than 100,000 people, inferences of social similarities between cities with 100,000 and 5 million are tenuous. And with metro Oklahoma City having more than a million people, it becomes plain that urbanization has many faces.

Winning the Election With or Without Fraud

We continue to believe two things: that vote fraud occurred, and that Ahmadinejad likely would have won without it. Very little direct evidence has emerged to establish vote fraud, but several things seem suspect.

For example, the speed of the vote count has been taken as a sign of fraud, as it should have been impossible to count votes that fast. The polls originally were to have closed at 7 p.m. local time, but voting hours were extended until 10 p.m. because of the number of voters in line. By 11:45 p.m. about 20 percent of the vote had been counted. By 5:20 a.m. the next day, with almost all votes counted, the election commission declared Ahmadinejad the winner. The vote count thus took about seven hours. (Remember there were no senators, congressmen, city council members or school board members being counted — just the presidential race.) Intriguingly, this is about the same time it took in 2005, though reformists that claimed fraud back then did not stress the counting time in their allegations.

The counting mechanism is simple: Iran has 47,000 voting stations, plus 14,000 roaming stations that travel from tiny village to tiny village, staying there for a short time before moving on. That creates 61,000 ballot boxes designed to receive roughly the same number of votes. That would mean that each station would have been counting about 500 ballots, or about 70 votes per hour. With counting beginning at 10 p.m., concluding seven hours later does not necessarily indicate fraud or anything else. The Iranian presidential election system is designed for simplicity: one race to count in one time zone, and all counting beginning at the same time in all regions, we would expect the numbers to come in a somewhat linear fashion as rural and urban voting patterns would balance each other out — explaining why voting percentages didn’t change much during the night.

It has been pointed out that some of the candidates didn’t even carry their own provinces or districts. We remember that Al Gore didn’t carry Tennessee in 2000. We also remember Ralph Nader, who also didn’t carry his home precinct in part because people didn’t want to spend their vote on someone unlikely to win — an effect probably felt by the two smaller candidates in the Iranian election.

That Mousavi didn’t carry his own province is more interesting. Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett writing in Politico make some interesting points on this. As an ethnic Azeri, it was assumed that Mousavi would carry his Azeri-named and -dominated home province. But they also point out that Ahmadinejad also speaks Azeri, and made multiple campaign appearances in the district. They also point out that Khamenei is Azeri. In sum, winning that district was by no means certain for Mousavi, so losing it does not automatically signal fraud. It raised suspicions, but by no means was a smoking gun.

We do not doubt that fraud occurred during the Iranian election. For example, 99.4 percent of potential voters voted in Mazandaran province, a mostly secular area home to the shah’s family. Ahmadinejad carried the province by a 2.2 to 1 ratio. That is one heck of a turnout and level of support for a province that lost everything when the mullahs took over 30 years ago. But even if you take all of the suspect cases and added them together, it would not have changed the outcome. The fact is that Ahmadinejad’s vote in 2009 was extremely close to his victory percentage in 2005. And while the Western media portrayed Ahmadinejad’s performance in the presidential debates ahead of the election as dismal, embarrassing and indicative of an imminent electoral defeat, many Iranians who viewed those debates — including some of the most hardcore Mousavi supporters — acknowledge that Ahmadinejad outperformed his opponents by a landslide.

Mousavi persuasively detailed his fraud claims Sunday, and they have yet to be rebutted. But if his claims of the extent of fraud were true, the protests should have spread rapidly by social segment and geography to the millions of people who even the central government asserts voted for him. Certainly, Mousavi supporters believed they would win the election based in part on highly flawed polls, and when they didn’t, they assumed they were robbed and took to the streets.

But critically, the protesters were not joined by any of the millions whose votes the protesters alleged were stolen. In a complete hijacking of the election by some 13 million votes by an extremely unpopular candidate, we would have expected to see the core of Mousavi’s supporters joined by others who had been disenfranchised. On last Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, when the demonstrations were at their height, the millions of Mousavi voters should have made their appearance. They didn’t. We might assume that the security apparatus intimidated some, but surely more than just the Tehran professional and student classes possess civic courage. While appearing large, the demonstrations actually comprised a small fraction of society.

Tensions Among the Political Elite

All of this is not to say there are not tremendous tensions within the Iranian political elite. That no revolution broke out does not mean there isn’t a crisis in the political elite, particularly among the clerics. But that crisis does not cut the way Western common sense would have it. Many of Iran’s religious leaders see Ahmadinejad as hostile to their interests, as threatening their financial prerogatives, and as taking international risks they don’t want to take. Ahmadinejad’s political popularity in fact rests on his populist hostility to what he sees as the corruption of the clerics and their families and his strong stand on Iranian national security issues.

The clerics are divided among themselves, but many wanted to see Ahmadinejad lose to protect their own interests. Khamenei, the supreme leader, faced a difficult choice last Friday. He could demand a major recount or even new elections, or he could validate what happened. Khamenei speaks for a sizable chunk of the ruling elite, but also has had to rule by consensus among both clerical and non-clerical forces. Many powerful clerics like Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani wanted Khamenei to reverse the election, and we suspect Khamenei wished he could have found a way to do it. But as the defender of the regime, he was afraid to. Mousavi supporters’ demonstrations would have been nothing compared to the firestorm among Ahmadinejad supporters — both voters and the security forces — had their candidate been denied. Khamenei wasn’t going to flirt with disaster, so he endorsed the outcome.

The Western media misunderstood this because they didn’t understand that Ahmadinejad does not speak for the clerics but against them, that many of the clerics were working for his defeat, and that Ahmadinejad has enormous pull in the country’s security apparatus. The reason Western media missed this is because they bought into the concept of the stolen election, therefore failing to see Ahmadinejad’s support and the widespread dissatisfaction with the old clerical elite. The Western media simply didn’t understand that the most traditional and pious segments of Iranian society support Ahmadinejad because he opposes the old ruling elite. Instead, they assumed this was like Prague or Budapest in 1989, with a broad-based uprising in favor of liberalism against an unpopular regime.

Tehran in 2009, however, was a struggle between two main factions, both of which supported the Islamic republic as it was. There were the clerics, who have dominated the regime since 1979 and had grown wealthy in the process. And there was Ahmadinejad, who felt the ruling clerical elite had betrayed the revolution with their personal excesses. And there also was the small faction the BBC and CNN kept focusing on — the demonstrators in the streets who want to dramatically liberalize the Islamic republic. This faction never stood a chance of taking power, whether by election or revolution. The two main factions used the third smaller faction in various ways, however. Ahmadinejad used it to make his case that the clerics who supported them, like Rafsanjani, would risk the revolution and play into the hands of the Americans and British to protect their own wealth. Meanwhile, Rafsanjani argued behind the scenes that the unrest was the tip of the iceberg, and that Ahmadinejad had to be replaced. Khamenei, an astute politician, examined the data and supported Ahmadinejad.

Now, as we saw after Tiananmen Square, we will see a reshuffling among the elite. Those who backed Mousavi will be on the defensive. By contrast, those who supported Ahmadinejad are in a powerful position. There is a massive crisis in the elite, but this crisis has nothing to do with liberalization: It has to do with power and prerogatives among the elite. Having been forced by the election and Khamenei to live with Ahmadinejad, some will make deals while some will fight — but Ahmadinejad is well-positioned to win this battle.

An observation by Peggy Noonan

2009-06-20T17:45:00.004-04:00

At this point, maybe my favorite conservative commentator is ~~David Letterman~~ Peggy Noonan. In today’s op-ed piece in the WSJ, Ms. Noonan is holding forth on the dissent in Iran and how it was much helped along by technology in general and social networking technology in particular. Anyway, there are many thoughtful points in the article, but this is what I'd like to point out:

[Technology] is not the friend of entrenched tyranny. Connected to which, it would be nice if the technologies of the future were not given babyish names. Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc., have come to be crucial and historically consequential tools, and yet to refer to them is to talk baby talk. In the future could inventors please keep the weight and dignity of history in mind?

Skating away....

2009-06-16T00:04:00.005-04:00

As I've commented a few times before, sometimes I wake up with a particular song lyric running through my mind.

Monday, it was "skating away", although the lines I remembered (as shown below) weren't true to the original.

As you push off from the shore
Won't you turn your head once more
You're a rabbit on the run

And have you ever had the feeling
That your song is too damned real
And in the present tense

Skating away
Skating away
Skating away, on the thin ice of a new day

A good goat will do that...

2009-06-12T07:49:00.008-04:00

....

The title of this post is inspired by an old joke, but the post is brought about by an analogy in an entry of The Economist's Democracy in America blog entitled Extreme stupidity. The subject of their post is the ridiculous jockeying of our politicos to assign & avoid culpability or connection in the sad and horrific murder at the Holocaust Museum this week.

People this far out on the fringe are probably rather like the neighbour who turns out to have a powerful sexual attraction to goats: It is not helpful to inquire into the goats' gender in order to determine whether the fellow is "gay" or "straight"; his orientation is decidedly "other".

....

Smackin' or uh...not so exquisite.

2009-06-04T23:04:00.004-04:00

Exquisite...

2009-05-30T11:41:00.005-04:00

Eric Felten's Wall Street Journal column, How's Your Drink holds forth this week on the Gibson, essentially a dry martini featuring a pearl onion in place of the traditional olive garnish.

Anyway, Mr. Felten writes:

The greatest Gibson moment in all of popular culture is found in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” (1959). When ad executive Cary Grant is in New York, his drink of choice is what you would expect of a man so faultlessly tailored—Martinis at the Oak Bar. But when he is fleeing the city on the 20th Century Limited, he heads to the Pullman car and finds himself seated across from the exquisite Eva Marie Saint, with whom he is soon exchanging innuendo-rich pleasantries. The drink he orders? A Gibson—the perfect quaff for someone hurtling in a Northwesterly direction.

"..the exquisite Eva Marie Saint." I've got to agree with the use of that adjective.

.....

Las Vegas 5/26

2009-05-29T21:14:00.004-04:00

The original Mr. T

2009-05-24T16:52:00.004-04:00

Furthermore, on single malt versus blends...

2009-05-20T22:53:00.005-04:00

The scotch snobs are very keen on single malts which is OK. I also happen to like single malts. However, there are some blends I find quite attractive, particularly Johnnie Walker Black Label which I consider delicious whether on the rocks or neat.

Anyway, the point of the story is that I woke up this morning with a particular song lyric running through my mind.

How old do you think I am he said. I said well, I didn't know
He said I turned sixty five about eleven months ago
I was sittin' in Miami pourin' blended whiskey down
When this old grey black gentleman was cleanin' up the lounge
There wasn't anyone around 'cept this old man and me
The guy who ran the bar was watching Ironsides on TV....

Well, perhaps that the song would have been better if Tom T. Hall had penned "pouring single malt down," but I wouldn't want to second guess the lyrics of Tom T. Hall.

No kidding, this was on my mind when I woke up. I suppose I had been "dreaming in peaceful sleep of shady summertime, of old dogs and children, and watermelon wine."

Scotch tasting, The Macallan Cask Strength

2009-05-20T22:35:00.011-04:00

One word.

Delicious.

OK, so the previous post seems to indicate that ice is bad, or at least bad form.
However, this so called "Cask Strength" stuff is 57.8% alcohol, making it pretty tough on it's own.
So, I used one of my cognac glasses, but added about 4 ice cubes.

Note in one of the pictures below, how as the ice melted, (and thus water added), the liquid became cloudy. I understand this is a result of the whisky being "non-chill filtered." Still tasted great.

Is Scotch whiskey on ice so wrong?

2009-05-16T15:57:00.005-04:00

Actually, what's so wrong is my spelling of "whisky" as "whiskey."

Anyway, the following story was in The Wall Street Journal today.
The article essentially revolves around the appropriateness of adding ice to scotch whisky. As most folks who know me realize, I generally do, although in keeping with my nature as an anti-absolutist, sometimes I don't.

Some fairly snarky remarks in the comments section, but I suppose when those folks start paying my liquor bill I will start to worry about it.

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HOW'S YOUR DRINK
MAY 16, 2009
A Chill to Scotch Purists' Hearts

By ERIC FELTEN

Richard Paterson -- renowned whisky blender with Scotland's Whyte & Mackay Ltd., home of such single malts as the Dalmore and Isle of Jura -- has come to dread ordering whisky in America: "Ask for Scotch in the U.S. and before you know it you hear that horrible clink, clink, clink of ice going in the glass," he says in a voice that's two parts exasperation and one part burr. "As far as I'm concerned," says Mr. Paterson, "if you've got a nice 12-year-old Scotch whisky, there's nothing more ridiculous than putting ice in it."

Mr. Paterson is hardly the only whisky purist to rail against the pernicious effects of ice in Scotch. Kevin Erskine, who writes about whisky at theScotchBlog.com, says that when drinking Scotch neat "I may add varying amounts of water depending on the whisky, the weather and my mood -- but never an ice cube." But it is Mr. Paterson who, in the Scotch tasting seminars he hosts around the world, expresses his aversion to the practice by flinging a bucket of ice across the room.

The purists' complaint is that whereas a small splash of spring water seems to open up a whisky, releasing its full bouquet and flavor, ice tends to do the opposite. The tongue is anesthetized by the cold, and the whisky itself acquires a smoothness that glosses over the deeper complexities of the dram.

But that particular sort of frigid gloss is just what many, perhaps most, Americans are looking for in their whisky. And it's worth noting that, in the U.S., the taste for drinking Scotch on the rocks was itself a move toward a more pure whisky experience. In the first half of the 20th century the standard way to drink Scotch in the States was in a Highball -- a tall glass of whisky, ice and soda water. It was toward the end of the 1940s that the phrase "on the rocks" emerged to describe doing without the fizzy dilution of seltzer. By 1950 Whitney Bolton, a New York Morning Telegraph columnist, wrote that "in the last six months sales of sparkling water in all brands have dropped alarmingly."

Before long, Scotch brands such as the Famous Grouse were promoting their whiskies as being well suited for drinking with ice. Even now, after a couple of decades of emphasis on single-malt connoisseurship, Scotch ads in the U.S. still tend to feature ice in the glass.

But that doesn't mean Scotch professionals are happy about the way Americans drink their product. The Islay single-malt distillery Bruichladdich nods to the durable U.S. preference by offering a "Rocks" version of its whisky specially selected to hold up to the icy onslaught. But Bruichladdich exec Mark Reynier still complains: "We go to all the lengths to provide hand-selected, natural whisky, unadulterated by additives, sweeteners or colorings," he says, "only for the drinker to go and add chlorine and fluoride," chemicals commonly found in frozen tap water.

So there is a move to elevate Scotch on the rocks by improving the rocks. Most ice at home suffers from chlorine and/or the smelly taint of frozen foods. Ice at bars and restaurants tends to be in little chips or discs that melt too fast. The best bars have machines that produce big, square-sided cubes. The Macallan distillery is taking it one step further by encouraging bars to acquire its "ice ball" machine, which crafts a crystalline sphere of frozen water slightly smaller than a baseball, served one to a glass. At home, the best bet is to make fresh ice using spring water in a tray that makes big cubes.

Less persnickety about ice is Heather Greene, who has made an unlikely name for herself in whisky circles. It's rare for an American to gain credibility in the world of Scotch, and rarer still for a woman to do so. She earned a reputation for having a smart palate while working in Scotland on the Scotch Malt Whisky Society's tasting panel. Now she's back in the U.S. as a "brand ambassador" for Glenfiddich, and her return home has challenged some of the notions she acquired in her apprenticeship.

"When I first came back from Scotland, I was in a traditionalist mind-set, steadfast and stubborn against the idea of ice in whisky." But that changed after she hosted a promotional tasting last summer at a New York bar where the AC was on the blink. In the sweltering summer heat, the guests were fading -- until she got a bucket of ice and started serving 12-year-old Glenfiddich on the rocks. "You lose richness and depth of flavor," she says, "but you gain refreshment and smoothness."

American culture's emphasis on refreshment has something to do with the climate. "That's what we do in America," says Ms. Greene, embracing her patrimony. "We put ice in our drinks."

Even Mr. Paterson grudgingly acknowledges that people should, at the end of the day, drink their whisky the way they like it. He just asks that, before you decide that you prefer Scotch on the rocks, you try it his way as well. Start with a decent room-temperature dram: "You should hold the whisky in your mouth, first on your tongue, then under your tongue, then around your mouth," and only then let it slip down your throat. As an exercise in tasting, it's not a bad routine, though I suspect most of us would rather relax and enjoy the whisky than make the experience an exercise in sensory analysis.

Still, I think the ice-dependent drinkers among us will find it illuminating to do their own side-by-side tasting. Take a good, straightforward single malt (any of the standard drams represented by the partisans I consulted -- Macallan, Glenfiddich, Bruichladdich, or Dalmore -- will do admirably). Pour two glasses: one without ice, and another embellished with a large cube or two of ice made from spring water. Take a taste of the tepid malt. It will seem at first sip rather fiery. Then taste the iced whisky. It will seem soothing, a respite from the spirit's alcohol burn. But then go back to the neat Scotch. You'll find that it blossoms with flavor in your mouth. If you keep going back and forth, I suspect you will perceive the taste of the Scotch on the rocks as narrower and perhaps even thinner with each sip.

Which isn't to say you won't want to drink your whisky that way. For me, Scotch on the rocks tastes more like a whisky cocktail than like whisky per se. And I just happen to like whisky cocktails.

Mr. Felten is the author of "How's Your Drink?" (Agate Surrey), now available in paperback. Email him at eric.felten@wsj.com.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W11

Further blog fodder...

2009-05-15T17:41:00.005-04:00

"Those who blog, blog. Those who can't, cut & paste. "
I guess that would be me emulating the aforementioned form.

Anyway, from James Taranto of the WSJ:

President Obama gave the commencement address Wednesday at Arizona State University, and blogger Jim Hoft notes what he describes as a rather audacious passage from the president's speech:

We've become accustomed to our economic dominance in the world, forgetting that it wasn't reckless deals and get-rich-quick schemes that got us where we are, but hard work and smart ideas--quality products and wise investments. We started taking shortcuts. We started living on credit, instead of building up savings.

Uh, what do you mean "we," kemo sabe? Two weeks ago New York's Daily News ran an op-ed by "an elected official in California"--not Nancy Pelosi, we'd guess--writing under the pseudonym Richard Henry Lee. "Lee" evaluated Obama's personal finances and found that for several years the future president lived just the way he decried in Tempe:

A close examination of their finances shows that the Obamas were living off lines of credit along with other income for several years until 2005, when Obama's book royalties came through and Michelle received her 260% pay raise at the University of Chicago. This was also the year Obama started serving in the U.S. Senate. . . .

In April 1999, they purchased a Chicago condo and obtained a mortgage for $159,250. In May 1999, they took out a line of credit for $20,750. Then, in 2002, they refinanced the condo with a $210,000 mortgage, which means they took out about $50,000 in equity. Finally, in 2004, they took out another line of credit for $100,000 on top of the mortgage.

Tax returns for 2004 reveal $14,395 in mortgage deductions. If we assume an effective interest rate of 6%, then they owed about $240,000 on a home they purchased for about $159,250.

This means they spent perhaps $80,000 beyond their income from 1999 to 2004.

A less charitable observer, or one less inclined to paralipsis, might characterize Obama's book royalties as more of a "get-rich-quick scheme" than a "quality product." But in any case, they passed the marketplace test, so more power to him.

Smokin' Part II

2009-05-12T18:39:00.004-04:00

Not quite as glamorous as the folks in the prior smokin' post, but definitely back in the day.

Audi S4 @ 160 MPH

2009-05-04T01:23:00.013-04:00

Check out this youtube of some numb-nuts pushing it in an S4.
The video is billed as 160 MPH, but I don't think I saw them ever get there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4dR1Vihz18&feature=player_embedded

I happen to have a B5 S4 as well. I thought that the top speed was supposed to be "electronically limited" to 142 MPH. I suppose I was mistaken.

I may have briefly punched mine up to maybe 110 or so a time or two, but that's about as far as I've gone. 160 would be out of the question. My video is below:

One exception about driving fast however.
The fastest I've ever driven (for a sustained period on a public highway) was in Montana.
The rental car just kind of stalled out at about 105, would coast, and then resume acceleration at about 95 MPH. It wasn't scary at all.

I would have liked to have seen how my S4 performed out there.

Furthermore, from "The Sports Curmudgeon"

2009-04-29T23:58:00.002-04:00

The Sports Curmudgeon's post for today.
But don't get him wrong.... he loves sports.

April 29, 2009

I Just Do Not Care…

Recently, I had the opportunity to break bread with an old friend – a long-term reader of these rants – and his new significant other. As the conversation evolved, she asked me if I cared about a variety of sports and I always answered that I did - - even if some of the minor sports commanded a smaller degree of caring than others. Finally, she asked if there were any things in the sports world that I didn’t care about. When I answered in the affirmative, she seemed surprised and asked for examples. That led to a discussion, which led to making a list of “Things I Just Do Not Care About”. And that list gave birth to this rant.

With the NFL Draft fresh in my mind, the very first thing I mentioned that went on the list was “Mock Drafts”. There was a time when one or two people did Mock Drafts late in the week leading up to the Actual Draft. Those were interesting to a degree because they were “different”, the people doing the mock drafts were presumed to be knowledgeable, and the Actual Draft was imminent. All of that is so horribly diluted now by the presence of Mock Drafts written by thousands of people who possess degrees of knowledgeability that are undecipherable. Compounding that horror is the fact that you can go looking now for draft orders for the 2010 NFL Draft such that all you need do is plug in the NFL teams in the reverse order of their finish for 2009 and get the first round for April 2010. Categorically, let me say that there is no value to such things other than to contribute to the entropy death of the universe. I just do not care…

As a corollary to Mock Drafts, I no longer care about “Bracketology”. I do not recall when it was that I read my first projected NCAA basketball brackets this season but it was within a week either way of New Year’s Day. That is too much blather and babble to maintain interest. It got to the point that whenever I heard someone on radio or TV prattle on regarding the projected brackets, I thought to myself how much nicer it would be to wait until that certain Sunday evening and to allow the doings of the Selection Committee to manifest themselves. I just do not care…

The WNBA regular season and its playoffs are simply uninteresting. I just do not care…

The NHL regular season and the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs constitute a set of contests that go on for far too long involving far too many teams that mean nothing to me or to the majority of sports fans in North America. I just do not care…

The NBA regular season represents about six months of ennui punctuated by a few seconds of real excitement randomly strewn throughout that time span. I just do not care…

Sideline reporters have even less likelihood to produce something interesting/compelling than does a random NBA regular season game. The same goes for “news conferences” with a golfer who just won a tournament, the owner/trainer/jockey of a horse that just won a major race, the owner of a team that just won the World Series or the Super Bowl or anyone from the NCAA speaking about the wonderful “student-athletes”. I just do not care…

If someone is in a fantasy league for any sport from baseball to NASCAR to the Iditarod, I really do not care about your team or how you went through the analysis to select your team or what your standing in your imaginary league may be. I do not want to hear about it; I do not want to read about it. If I really were interested, I would have an analogous entry in a separate league - - but I do not have such an entry because I do not have a real interest. By the way, if I had an analogous entry in a separate league, you should not care about my team and I would not presume to bother you with stories about it. I just do not care…

National Signing Day – the day when high school seniors announce where they will go to college to play football – is less interesting to me than a treatise on dandruff in some obscure species of woodpeckers. I just do not care…

Televised poker was a curiosity – and therefore interesting – for a while about five years ago. In the intervening time, it has become so horrendously overexposed and with relentless reruns that it has become actively antagonistic. I enjoy reading Norman Chad’s syndicated sports column; he is creative and clever. Nonetheless, I want to throw a brick at him every time I see him on ESPN leading into yet another poker program. I just do not care…

At least televised poker had a moment in the sun when it was interesting. Televised fishing and televised deer hunting - - or hunting for any other species - - has never been particularly interesting and has not attained any level of interest as years go by. Poker, fishing and hunting are participatory events not spectator sports. [Aside: Sex is also not a spectator sport, which is why XXX Rated Movies are not of any interest to me.] I just do not care…

The poker craze on television followed a natural and predictable course. Once the producers had run out of WSOP events to show and had shown the same professional poker players participating in mind-numbingly repetitive tournaments taking place at different latitudes and longitudes, they fell back on a tried and true expansion formula. Let’s show celebrities playing poker and ask anyone who actually knows how to play poker to suspend their incredulity at the lack of ability of these celebrities. If you think I got tired of watching WSOP reruns, you have no idea how quickly and vehemently I tired of Celebrity Poker. The reason here is that it brings together two things I have no interest in - - televised poker and celebrities. Celebrities are interesting only when they exhibit the talents/abilities that make them worthy of notice in the first place. Celebrities in any other context are boring. I just do not care…

And so, as a logical consequence of my lack of interest in celebrities, let me highlight just a few here to give you sense of where my head is at:

Anything Alex Rodriguez does or says outside the context of a baseball game is uninteresting.

Athletes and celebrities have sex with one another so frequently that it is no longer news and no longer interesting.

David Beckham is not interesting to an amazing degree. His off-the-pitch life has been uninteresting for a while; now he has created a drama about where he will actually play soccer and that drama is uninteresting too.

Lance Armstrong was an inspirational story at first. Now he seems to be such an attention-whore that he has become uninteresting.

Speaking of attention-whores, Danica Patrick took up residence in that zip code a while back. Think about how unimportant she is as an “athlete” any more; what do you read more about, her racing endeavors or her appearances in the SI Swimsuit Edition?

And it should go without saying that Brett Favre’s career decisions and life vector are uninteresting.

For all of these issues and the hundreds that are fundamentally the same - - where only the names change to expose the guilty, I just do not care…

I have two words for you here. Reality … Television. No, it is not. I just do not care…

While it may be a bit tangential here, let me also say for the record that I find Facebook, My Space and Twittering monumentally uninteresting. I just do not care…

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

From The Economist: 100 days: Obama in seven haikus

2009-04-29T23:55:00.002-04:00

From the Democracy In America blog


Posted by:: Economist.com | NEW YORK

FROM the editor of More Intelligent Life:

In 100 days
A super-majority.
What next? A hushed Rush?

Seventy percent
Of Americans dig him
The dog didn't hurt.

As long as his foes
Hold lame "tea-party" protests
The force is with him.

A plump government
Is grand if it means cheap meds,
Not water-boarding.

Such ambition! Well,
Roosevelt would be impressed
If not Kim Jong Il.

It is a fine thing
To have a smart president
Whose sentences work.

A fine amuse bouche
For what promises to be
A grand, filling meal.

smokin'

2009-04-25T21:23:00.016-04:00

mostly from back in the day.

YSL.

Angelica & Jack

Anne Klein

Billy Preston & Mick
Who's the guy behind Preston?

Kid Rock

Buckley on Buckley(s) and on being an orphan @ age 55

2009-04-22T21:25:00.003-04:00

Christopher Buckley writes on the loss of both parents.

Usually, I just copy and paste the entire article, but this one is pretty long.
In my opinion, it is worth reading in its entirety.

I've always found C. Buckley to be a funny writer. This too is funny, but with pathos.

A few excerpts however:

One realization does dawn upon the death of the second parent, namely that you’ve now moved into the green room to the River Styx. You’re next. Another thing about parental mortality: No matter how much you’ve prepared for the moment, when it comes, it comes at you hot, hard and unrehearsed.

///////////////////
Mum’s serial misbehavior over the years had driven me, despairing, to write her scolding — occasionally scalding — letters. Now I saw that she had simply stopped opening all letters from me, against the possibility that they might contain another excoriation. I opened one of them and read:
Dear Mum, That really was an appalling scene at dinner last night. . . .
I wished that I could take back that letter, even though every word of it had been carefully weighed and justified.

////////////////
I forgive you. I was glad to have the chance to say that to her at the hospital, holding her hand, tears streaming down my face. I can hear her saying, Are you quite finished, or shall I fetch my Stradivarius?
///////////////
When Mum was in full prevarication, Pup would assume an expression somewhere between a Jack Benny stare and the stoic grimace of a 13th-century saint being burned at the stake.
//////////////
Pup’s self-medicating was, I’d venture, a chemical extension of the control he asserted over every other aspect of his life. The term “control freak” is pejorative. Put it this way: Few great men — and I use the term precisely, for Pup was a great man — do not assert total control over their domains. I doubt Winston Churchill ever said, “Whatever.”
/////////////

cheers.

Scotch tasting, Glenrothes

2009-04-21T19:57:00.005-04:00

Not bad. This is a Speyside whisky which in my
experience makes it a bit more approachable.

However, I thought that the initial taste had somewhat of a puckering kind of bitter/sour flavor.
The finish is relatively smooth and mellow. OK, but probably not going to be counted among my favorites.

Also, I've gotta say, the synthetic cork stopper was a little bit of a turnoff for me.

Notes from the Scotchchix.com website:

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Glenrothes Select Reserve

The youngest sister of the Glenrothes Girls, Glenrothes Select Reserve, would seem to fit the sugar and spice and everything nice category. She has a light sweet body and palate with pepper overtures. Her lingering, fizzy finish, however, detracts from her personality. Her demeanor was improved by a drop of water.

Whisky: Glenrothes Select Reserve

Pronunciation: Glen-ROTH-iss

Region: Speyside

Not particularly impressed with my scotch tastings

2009-04-15T23:36:00.002-04:00

Scotch tasting, Laphroaig

2009-04-14T20:34:00.009-04:00

Now that we're done with Lent, for a while, I decided it was probably about time to start do some scotch tasting. Note that I indicated "scotch tasting" as opposed to "scotch guzzling", which means that I'll probably just enjoy one or maybe two.

I'm starting with the Laphroaig Islay, which is probably the least approachable of the five shown.
Laphroaig as been described as follows:

..one of the most, if not the most, distinctive of all malt whiskies and many adjectives have been used to describe it - medicinal, phenolic, tangy, oily, and peaty being just a few. For many it is an acquired taste, but one which rewards persistence.

I am inclined to agree with that description.

The reason I'm starting with the Laphroaig is that I'm most of the way through the bottle already. I suppose I should have gotten another Islay for comparison purposes, Lagavullen perhaps. Maybe I'll come back to that one.

Cheers!

cheers

2009-04-08T00:28:00.004-04:00

Mom's birthday would have been today.

Strange, 2001 was a tough year. It started with my mother who died om January 8'th, and of course, September 2001 ushered in a new way of life for America.

Cheers, Mom, I'm still thinking of you.

From The Economist

2009-04-04T14:27:00.004-04:00

Quote of the day

Posted by:
Economist.com l WASHINGTON

BE CAREFUL how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that. My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.

Barack Obama, speaking to corporate CEOs.

Reports that he was wearing a Nehru jacket and stroking a white cat could not be confirmed.

Martinsville

2009-04-03T17:46:00.005-04:00

Went to Martinsville last weekend. Rick Hendrick's drivers have won 15 clocks. Shown to the left is the car that got the first win.

Lots of rubbing. notice the signature on the 77 car's door panel.

Three wide coming out of turn 4.

What's Going On...

2009-04-02T21:25:00.004-04:00

Marvin Gaye was born this day in 1939.
He died April 1, 1984.

In my opinion, What's Going On is one of the best concept albums ever.

What's Going On lyrics:

Mother, mother
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today

Father, father
We don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today

Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see
Oh, what's going on
What's going on
Ya, what's going on
Ah, what's going on

Father, father, everybody thinks we're wrong
Oh, but who are they to judge us
Simply because our hair is long
Oh, you know we've got to find a way
To bring some understanding here today

Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me
So you can see
What's going on
Ya, what's going on
Tell me what's going on
I'll tell you what's going on
Right on baby
Right on baby

I suppose my main muse Marcus would correct the lyrics, as the contraction of "there is" should be stated "there are".

Comments?

The Katharine Hepburn of Cocktails

2009-03-28T14:55:00.005-04:00

The article below is from today's WSJ.

For some reason, I can kind of imagine Ms. Hepburn asking for a whiskey sour in that patrician, yet slightly raspy voice of hers. "A whiskey sour, please", the "whiskey" enunciated in a clipped manner and "sour" drawn out just a little more.

Or paraphrasing Bogart's mocking line in African Queen, "Can you make a whiskey sour? Then do so, Mr. Allnut."

///////////////////

HOW'S YOUR DRINK
MARCH 27, 2009, 10:00 P.M. ET

The Katharine Hepburn of Cocktails

By ERIC FELTEN

H.L. Mencken, in the February 1912 issue of the Smart Set magazine, argued that whatever difficulties were associated with drinking, the fault wasn't in the liquor, but in excess: "Alcohol in small doses dilutes and ameliorates our native vileness," Mencken wrote. He lavished praise, in particular, on one of the most basic drinks in the cocktail canon, "the ingratiating whiskey sour, that gives 90 per cent of all civilized lovers the valor to make the last enslaving avowals."

Some three decades later the drink was still entwined with romance of sorts, making an appearance at the opening of Raymond Chandler's second novel, "Farewell, My Lovely." A mountain of a man drags detective Philip Marlowe up a flight of stairs to a seedy bar: "Let's you and me go on up and maybe nibble a drink," he says. The giant is searching for his long lost love, a girl named Velma who was "cute as lace pants" and who used to warble at the saloon.

"We leaned against the bar," Marlowe narrates.

"'Whiskey sour,' the big man said. 'Call yours.'

"'Whiskey sour,' I said.

"We had whiskey sours."

Moose "on account of I'm large" Malloy isn't exactly a delicate flower when it comes to drinking: "The big man licked his whiskey sour impassively down the side of the thick squat glass." And soon, frustrated that no one knows Velma's whereabouts, he starts to get angry: "His whiskey sour hadn't seemed to improve his temper."

Chandler liked this scene well enough that he used it twice. The version that opens "Farewell, My Lovely" is lifted nearly word for word from a short story Chandler had written a few years before, "Try the Girl." (If only Chandler had thought to change some ugly racial caricatures in his rewrite -- a scrubbing that was actually made for the 1944 movie version, "Murder, My Sweet.")

In any case, it's fitting that Whiskey Sours (or should that be "Whiskeys Sour"?) should make several appearances in the Chandler oeuvre, as it has been observed, by the estimable essayist Anthony Lane, that the atmosphere of the novelist's Los Angeles is a "whiskey-sour climate."

The particular descriptive nature of the words "whiskey sour" has been put to use by other critics. In particular, when New York theater scribe George Jean Nathan reviewed the Philip Barry play "Without Love," in 1942, he marveled at the odd appeal of its star, Katharine Hepburn. "Although she is hardly the possessor of any overpowering sex attraction," Nathan wrote, "she is appetizing in the same chill way that a whisky sour is."

Which in my book is pretty darn appetizing -- that is, if the Whiskey Sour is competently compounded. Unfortunately, these days that is a rare occurrence. Go to the average sort of bar and ask for the drink and you will almost certainly be given a slop composed of whiskey and that dreadful prefab crutch, "sour mix." There are some bars that make their own sour mix fresh daily, but even that leads to a substandard drink, as citrus juices oxidize remarkably fast. "Trader" Vic Bergeron, in his 1947 "Bartender's Guide," got it right when he wrote: "A Sour can be the most disappointing drink in the world if it's not made with fresh lemon juice." How then to explain all that bottled citrus-and-corn-syrup mess? My guess is that the standard recipe is about two parts laziness and three parts larceny. As such, the Whiskey Sour (as with other drinks in the same family, including the Sidecar) makes an excellent test of a bar's bona fides. If the bartender reaches for the sour mix, you know to find another place to bib.

Even if properly made from scratch, the Whiskey Sour is a troublesome commodity. The problem is getting the proportions right: "This is an easy drink to screw up and a hard one to nail because the ratio of flavors is a precarious balance," writes Dale DeGroff in his recent book, "The Essential Cocktail." He says it is the classic Sour, whether made with whiskey or any other spirit, "that separates the amateur bartender from the pro." The ingredients are simple enough -- whiskey, fresh lemon juice, and sugar. But how much of each? Mr. DeGroff suggests 1½ ounces of whiskey, one ounce of simple (sugar) syrup, and three-quarters of an ounce of lemon juice. (He also suggests adding a dash of egg white so that the drink is attractively frothy on top.)

That's a good place to start, and is consistent with recipes from the late 19th century, when the Whiskey Sour was in its first vogue. But many will find it both too sweet and too lemony for their tastes. David Embury -- who, in his 1948 guide "The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks," advocated relentlessly for drinks to be strong and dry -- urged readers to make Sours with the basic proportion of one part sweet (sugar) and two parts sour (citrus) to eight parts strong (spirit). For me, that's not far wrong, though a bit too tart. I suggest starting with one part each sweet and sour and four parts strong, adjusting the proportions to your taste. Shake it with ice and strain into a short sturdy glass with ice. You can also serve it in a glass packed with crushed ice, a variation known, around 1900, as a Nose-Cooler. Or add orange bitters, shake and strain into a stemmed cocktail glass and you get a vintage cocktail called a Buster Brown.

The traditional decoration for a Sour has been a cherry and a slice of orange or lemon. (Occasionally, and excessively, sticks of pineapple have been employed.) Esquire's 1949 "Handbook for Hosts" asserted that the garnish on a Whiskey Sour was a gender-based preference: "Women like it decorated with fruit." Embury suggested doing away with the "garbage" -- midcentury bar slang for "garnish" -- altogether. Your call.

But when you nibble your Whiskey Sours, remember not to overdo it. Mencken's point is well taken that in excess anything -- whether drinks or platitudes -- becomes "a debauch, a saturnalia, a delirium!" Whereas a nice Whiskey Sour "is not a viper," but "a sweet singing canary, a faithful house dog, a purring cat upon a hearth rug."

Whiskey Sour
2 oz bourbon or rye whiskey

½ oz fresh-squeezed lemon juice

½ oz simple (sugar) syrup

Shake with ice and strain into a short glass with ice.

Garnish, or don't, with cherry and a slice of orange or lemon. Adjust the proportions to your own taste, and try adding a tablespoon of egg white, before shaking, to give the drink a frothy head.

Mr. Felten is the author of "How's Your Drink?: Cocktails, Culture and the Art of Drinking Well" (Agate Surrey). Email him at eric.felten@wsj.com.

/////////////////

Fresh New Looks For Spring

2009-03-26T15:47:00.003-04:00

I recently received an email from an apparel retailer with subject line "Fresh New Looks For Spring." All that was in the body of the email was the photo shown below along with some "click to order" links.

I would have to agree with the subject line. Fresh Indeed!

St. Patrick's Day quotes, courtesy of Brendan Behan

2009-03-16T19:45:00.005-04:00

"Other people have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis. "

"If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks "

"It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody."

Also, several years ago, I noted graffiti on the men's room wall of Paddy O'Toole's in Mobile, AL

"the only good republican is an Irish Republican"

As always, Cheers!

Madoff - disgraced financier?

2009-03-12T10:41:00.003-04:00

A front page column in yesterday's Wall Street Journal starts with the following sentence:

Disgraced financier Bernard Madoff is expected to plead guilty on Thursday to 11 felony charges stemming from his decades-long Ponzi scheme, likely putting him in prison for the rest of his life.

"Disgraced financier" indeed. If I understand correctly, this guy was crooked from the beginning.
So, accordingly, perhaps we might call a rapist or wife-beater a "disgraced ladies' man"?

At the bottom of this dish are cigar butts from 1996

2009-03-07T16:36:00.003-05:00

This is an old planter on my front porch.

Back in 1996, after I first moved into my current abode, I had a convertible and would often enjoy a cigar or the remainder of one on the way home. On the way inside, I needed a convenient receptacle and this was it.

That was two convertibles ago and I no longer own an open top vehicle but if I smoke a cigar outside, this is where the remnant goes.

She's annoyed with Ish Smith, but that takes the heat off me.

2009-03-04T19:07:00.007-05:00

Snow...

2009-03-02T11:47:00.002-05:00

Democracy in America on President Obama's Address

2009-02-24T21:55:00.003-05:00

A single funny comment from the referenced blog in the Economist.

9:43: Mrs Pelosi leaps up at the words "energy, health and education" as if she'd bet on them in the office pool.

Many of the (contemporaneous) reader comments that accompany the (again, contemporaneous)
posting are amusing as well.

Cheers!

A nice, feel good column from the WSJ

2009-02-23T18:54:00.003-05:00

Published Saturday, 2/21. This column really should have (IMHO) been published one week earlier.

////////////////////////////

LIFE & STYLE
FEBRUARY 21, 2009

A Long-Distance Connection

Their romance started the day before he left for Iraq -- and it grew by phone and email

By DARIN STRAUSS

Strike one against Neil Rice and Andrea Truncali: Their romance actually began as a long-distance relationship -- that precarious structure wherein lovers make do without the warm and essential things romance is meant to provide in the first place. Strike two: The relationship started the day before Neil left to serve in Iraq.

Neil was a naval lieutenant on leave; Andrea was a new doctor. They were acquaintance-friends from college; in the summer of '05 they both happened to be in a party of other Duke grads in upstate New York.

"Wow," Neil thought, during the first real conversation they'd ever had, "I never knew she was this cute and fun." (Which Andrea is, with her expressive eyebrows and Phyllis Diller laugh.)

They did some flirting. But Neil decided not to make the moves. Because not only was he heading for Iraq, but he'd also called a moratorium on dating college friends.

Still, they kept talking at this party. Or rather, Andrea talked and laughed and Neil tried to keep up with her. She has one of those rare mouths where the hydraulics of the smile are always going, and she's kind of hyper.

Neil's her opposite number: calm if not stoical, polite, a little quiet in his confidence, softly handsome with a strong chest and gentle eyes. He's the guy at the end of the evening who'll take a second to befriend dogs and children while the rest of the adults are finding their coats.

The next morning, he was readying for a drive to Kentucky -- from where he'd ship back to the Green Zone. (He was in naval intelligence, working in a palace basement, tasked with recording how many soldiers had died on a given week.) But his friend Colin had received a voicemail from Andrea: "Tell Neil if he wants to stop by and see me on his way out, he should come to Brooklyn and say goodbye."

If you're driving to Kentucky from upstate New York, Brooklyn is not exactly the place to make a stopover. But here was an intriguing offer. "Is she asking me on a date?" Neil wondered. "Where would I sleep?" He called Andrea about a mile from Colin's house and told her that Brooklyn was right on his way to Kentucky.

They made plans to meet at the Fall Café, a grungy coffee shop. Neil got there an hour early. "It's because I'm military," he says.

Neil still remembers the sight of her walking toward the window, and how his heart thumped. He hopped from his seat and met her before she got to the door. Andrea smiled when she saw him; there was, Andrea says, "a self-conscious cheek kiss."

Coffee led to dinner at an outdoor Mexican restaurant. After a few glasses of wine, the chitchat had spread out into real conversation. They talked the war, romance, life, all the heavy things. "OK," Neil thought. "I guess this is definitely a date."

Never a loquacious guy, he realized how badly he'd needed to talk to anyone. "That's not to say Andrea herself wasn't great," he says. "But I'd been in a basement alone for a long time."

They went back to her place and talked even more, when an awkward fact came up. It was after midnight. "I can sleep in my truck," Neil told her, kind of shyly. "Or can I maybe sack out on your couch?"

"I don't have a couch," she said.

"Maybe I can sleep on the floor?"

"Or my bed," Andrea said.

But then -- really -- they just kept talking. Neil was thinking: "I don't feel right trying to kiss her the day before I go to a war zone." Andrea was thinking: "Is Neil gay?"

At sunrise he finally kissed Andrea. Just a little, on the end of her bed. "I'll always remember that," Neil says.

And then it was time to go.

She thought it had been a fun night, "but I didn't even know what he was thinking, so I was trying not to think too much, myself. I guess we were on the edge of something, but neither of us was knew where it would go," she says.

Still, he called her on his drive, from West Virginia, just to tell her he missed her. He called when he got to Kentucky. He called from Kuwait. He still didn't think about where their romance could possibly be headed. That may have been the one thing they hadn't discussed -- and they still didn't, three days into their courtship.

His first night back in the Green Zone, he called her again, instead of going to sleep. He'd just taken off his Kevlar when a mortar explosion jiggled his building. Putting his helmet back on, his vest, his boots, he told her: "I have to go." But Andrea, affectionate and voluble Andrea, didn't get it. She was used to slow goodbyes with new boyfriends, and so she kept talking.

"No," he said. "You don't understand." Dust was dropping from his ceiling. The probability of other explosions loomed. "I have to go." And he got off the phone.

"That was when I realized, 'Oh, wow, he's in Iraq. And I might be dating him,''' Andrea says. "It hadn't really hit me until then, and I didn't know if that was what I wanted."

She emailed Neil the next day with another problematical fact, one that she'd kept from him. She had just broken up with an old boyfriend and was only 99% sure that she really wanted to stay broken up.

Neil got Andrea's email right after he'd received word that some men he knew had been killed. "I got angry at her message," Neil says. He sort of told her as much on email: "I can't deal, figure it out, and get back to me." Andrea says, "I thought his was a mean email."

They'd both already been in very serious relationships that had gone seriously wrong. She emailed Neil again, asking for a little time to figure things out. "Maybe because of our histories," Neil says, "we both acted more like adults." Andrea adds: "We weren't spring chickens." (They were 33.) But they decided to give this a chance -- whatever "this" meant.

They learned what "this" meant, on the fly, together. "When there's never been face-to-face contact, or any physical relationship, you're forced to get to know each other, and get creative," Neil says. Andrea sent him chocolate chip cookies that arrived stale. "People in the post office had never been so nice to me," she says.

Neil had a military cellphone; the deal was that if Andrea called him, she got a local rate. He could call home, on the taxpayers' nickel -- but only for emergencies. "I can neither confirm nor deny if I ever called her," Neil says.

They talked every day. After synching up their VCRs, they watched movies simultaneously, together and apart: "Casablanca," "It's a Wonderful Life" -- classics they knew were good because they didn't want to gamble the call on a potential stinker.

They sent intense emails, even poems, or just goofy jokes -- it was fun and serious, it was emotional and intellectual, and all conducted by phone and computer.

The calls were for Neil a daily getaway from the war, from the rubble, from the dank basement and the tallying of the dead.

For Andrea, though, Iraq was bad news that had quit humming around her ears and moved into her brain. Almost every day brought some fresh vision of disaster. And a price to pay: "Her social life was talking on the phone to me," Neil says.

They lived this way, separated and yet not, for six months. They first said "I love you" over a cellphone. "We kind of said it at the same time," Neil says. "It was obvious for both of us."

Then Neil came back.

"We were pretty sure he was going to move in with me," Andrea says. A big deal, since they'd only had one in-person date. After "processing out" at Ft. Bliss, Texas, Neil flew to Rhode Island and drove straight to Brooklyn.

"I couldn't find a parking spot," he says. "And so I remember running down the street to her building, working off the emotion, just sweating and anxious." What if everything fell short of expectation?

For fun, he waited until he was outside her apartment to call and say he was in New York. Then he knocked. When she opened the door, there was so much emotion it was hard to deal with, hard to sort through -- they just couldn't process it out. "It was so overwhelming: clumsy and fumbling," Neil says. "But it was good. It was good."

They admit it's kind of weird to learn every intimate detail about someone -- to be in love -- by your second actual date. But maybe it's a sound policy; it certainly worked for Neil and Andrea. He moved in with her the day after he got out of the military.

Eleven months later, they married. A year after that, they had a daughter. Naomi is now 3 months old.

Darin Strauss is the author of "Chang & Eng," "The Real McCoy" and "More Than It Hurts You." He teaches writing at New York University.

Any reason yesterday should have differed from any other day?

2009-02-15T17:09:00.007-05:00

........

Scotch tasting coming soon...

2009-02-12T23:29:00.004-05:00

In the meantime , enjoy a clip of The Fairlanes

..

A random thought,,,

2009-02-08T13:20:00.003-05:00

Marcus recently posted details of his evening at the Order of Osiris ball.

Things I learned: (other than that I can never ride in a limo again unless I am driving)

1.) I've never seen so many lesbians in my entire life. I finally figured out that all the guys were PERFORMING.

2.) At a gay ball, where there are oodles of women in tuxes, men in full-drag ball gowns, and drunken people who just don't care, all of the bathrooms are unisex. However, a real drag queen will ONLY use the ladies room, NEVER the men's room.

3.) Ugly guys make even uglier women.

These revelations brought to mind an old Shel Silverstein song:

Well there's gonna be a freaker's ball (ha ha)
Tonight at the Freaker's Hall
And you know you're invited one and all
Uh oh

Come on baby's grease your lips
Grab your hats and swing your hips
And don't forget to bring your whips
We're going to the freaker's ball (yes)

Blow your whistle, and bang your gong
Roll up something to take along
It feels so good, it must be wrong
We're freakin' at the freaker's ball

Well all the fags and the dykes they're boogie-in' together
The leather freaks are dressed in all kinds of leather
The greatest of the sadists and the masochists too
Screaming please hit me and I'll hit you

The FBI is dancin' with the junkies
All the straights, swingin' with the funkies
Across the floor and up the wall
We're freakin' at the freaker's ball, y'all
We're freakin' at the freaker's ball

Everybody's kissing each other
Brother with sister, son with mother
Smear my body up with butter
And take me to the freaker's ball

Pass that roach please, and pour the wine
I'll kiss yours if you'll kiss mine
I'm gonna boogie 'til I'm cold blind
Freakin' at the freaker's ball

White ones, black ones, yellow ones, red ones
Necrophiliacs looking for dead ones
The greatest of the sadists and the masochists too
Screaming please hit me and I'll hit you

Everybody ballin' in batches
Pyromaniacs strikin' matches
I'm gonna itch me where it scratches
Freakin' at the freaker's ball, y'all
We're freakin' at the freaker's ball

We're at a ball
We're freakin' at the freaker's ball

(c) 1973 Tro-Essex Music Ltd.

"oddly interesting"...strange praise for Winston-Salem

2009-02-05T23:26:00.007-05:00

ESPN's Pat Forde recently posted a very nice story about Wake Forest basketball coach Dino Gaudio.

The subject of my post, however, is his weekly Forde Minutes column in which he makes 40 different various (more of less) references (40 being the number of minutes in a regulation college game.)

I bring your attention to references 39 & 40:

Buzzer Beater
When hungry and thirsty in the oddly interesting town of Winston-Salem, N.C., The Minutes recommends a visit to the excellent Village Tavern (39). The New York strip and hot crab dip are tremendous, and the locals swear by the meat loaf. Pair your meal with a locally brewed Red Oak (40) lager and thank The Minutes later. (Caveat: This is one of the last tobacco towns in America, which means if you eat at the bar, you'll do so with smoke hovering overhead. But the help will take your mind off it by talking basketball as long as you're willing to sit there.)

I do like the Village Tavern. In fact, that's where my current squeeze first courted me when I moved to W-S back in 1989.

Aside...One time back in 1996 or so, the company I was working for engaged Arther Andersen for tax work. The local tax partner, Tim B., arrived with his tax manager Audra M. We were introduced and Audra said "I know you, you drink Johnnie Walker and your wife drinks Becks dark." I said "well, you're right, but she's not my wife." Audra spent some time as a bartender at Village Tavern while going to Wake.

Anyway....what I'm wondering about is why Winston-Salem would be considered "oddly interesting."