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In my last entry, I mentioned plans to mix two kinds of liquor and expose the mixture to ultraviolet light. Last night, I visited a couple of friends and did just that.
The results were less than encouraging, but still promising -- the mixture glowed, but it was faint. It wasn't the bright green of a glowstick, as I'd pictured and hoped -- it was more the dull green of radioactive waste that you'd see in B horror movies. However, I still plan to repeat this experiment later, changing a few variables.
One: according to Wikipedia, there are two kinds of Crème de Cacao: clear, and dark. I had the dark. The dark stuff is very dark, opaque, almost black. It is certainly possible that something in the reaction product would fluoresce brightly, but in this case, not enough ultraviolet light could get through the darkness. Attempting this experiment again, with the clear version of Crème de Cacao, will likely yield different results.
Two: my source of ultraviolet light was six UV LEDs wired in parallel, obtained from Radio Shack (Cat. 276-0014). I didn't have access to a UV tube, and at the time, six LEDs was all I could get. I've prewired my one of my breadboards to connect up to twelve LEDs, and with more jumpers, I may try as many as twenty-four. Even with all these LEDs, however, the experiment isn't perfect -- these LEDs put out UV, but they also put out a fair amount of blue-white. I may need to forget the LEDs, and find a friend with a tube.
Three: it may just have been my imagination, but the vanilla whiskey seemed to fluoresce on its own, albeit very faintly.
Conclusion: not an immediate unqualified success, but definitely not a failure either. May well become a success later. In any case, whether it was a successful experiment or not, the result is tasty if you like sweet drinks. It also packs a decent punch, at a little over sixty proof (assuming equal portions of ingredients). If you're one of those people who likes getting drunk, but doesn't actually like the taste of alcohol, this is a great way to do it.
Again, thanks to blackfyr and lysana, without whom I'd never have thought to try this.
I have Phillips Union vanilla whiskey. I have Crème de Cacao. And later today, I will have ultraviolet LEDs. This is gonna be awesome!
(Ahem. Sorry. Either lysana or blackfyr once posted about how this particular mix of alcoholic beverages glows green under UV, and I've been dying to try it ever since. I also have a digital camera, so I'll be taking pictures.)
I've tried a lot of flavors of vodka, including several fruit flavors and a couple of weird ones like chipotle and noble fir. Most of them were quite good. I don't think I could bring myself to try this one -- to me, it just sounds unspeakably gross. But then, you guys know me and how I feel about bacon in general.
Still, I'm sure this stuff will develop fans. Everything else with bacon does...
I took a lot of notes in my smartphone at BayCon, partly because I knew that I'd be drunk at the parties and thus unlikely to remember everything. Well, that's not entirely true. Let's face it, I was surrounded by geeks, and neat ideas were flying all over the place: good quotes, recommended books, tasty foods and drinks I haven't tried yet, the list goes on and on.
I've still got the codebreakers working on parts of my notes -- between sleep deprivation and intoxication, some of my notes are a little sloppy. Still, I captured a lot more than I would have without these notes. A few samples below:
Notes on Music:
I ended up chatting with about two or three people on music quite a bit. My notes here are a little fragmentary, but they're enough to summon more complete memories, or if not, I can punch them into Wikipedia and learn more. For instance, one of my notes was "helicopter quartet." This led me to the Helikopter-Streichquartett by Stockhausen, and then, "oh, yeah! That gent told me a lot about Stockhausen! I'm going to have to look that up!"
Some of the talk got very detailed, even arcane. You know how it's possible for engineers to completely geek out with each other, getting so technical that everyone who isn't also an engineer is completely left behind? Music theory can be just as bad. There was one chat with me, jon_decles, and one other gent whose name I don't remember, but I ended up chatting about Indian Music Theory with him last year -- and the three of us ended up driving all the non-music geeks off without realizing it.
Notes on Alcohol:
Noble fir vodka: I have no idea who came up with this, nor what possessed bovil to try it, but I'm very glad he tried it, and was then eager to share it.
Ginger liqueur (Koval, I think): Needed more ginger, but trust me to say that.
Caol Ila: this is one of the really smoky whiskeys -- it's a slightly lighter Talisker, for lack of a better way to describe it.
Ardbeg: For a moment, this one tastes really smooth and gentle. Then, it whacks you with a hammer and yells in your ear: "Ha ha, I'm smokier than Laphroaig!" Wonderful, wonderful stuff.
Glenmorangie: I tried a bunch of these at the Whiskey Brothers party. This was an education! All Glenmorangie is made by a single process, but aged differently -- a batch that's aged in barrels that were originally used for sherry is going to taste different from a batch aged in port barrels, and I took this as my chance to find out how. (They're all good, if way too mild for my tastes.)
Glen Kinchie: Very gentle. It's a little like Dalmore in how gentle it is, but it smells wonderful.
Vanilla Whiskey: apparently really damned popular. I shared this with several people, most of who really liked it. If I bring a hip-flask next year, this is what's going in it.
Notes on Food:
Edible flowers. Have never really gotten into them, but now I should. Violets are apparently criminally underrated.
Macapuno is a variety of fucked-up mutant coconut. Where most normal coconuts have crunchy meat and water inside, a macapuno has no water, and its meat is gelatinous. I've never heard of it, but thanks to caprine, I now need to find some, and then find a use for it. Apparently they're wicked good in ice cream. Terrific! I have a couple of friends with ice cream makers.
If farmount offers you chocolate... say yes, you idiot!
If elaryn offers you homemade toffee... say yes, you idiot!
Yeah, I've got a cold. I'm coping okay: I have enough energy to go to work and feed my iron addiction, and even chat with friends a little, though thanks to the Tully in my folk remedy, my typing suffers a bit.
(I'm not bidding for sympathy or anything. I'm posting this because I post all problems I have with respect to health, depression, or anger issues. I do this so that I can look back later and notice things like "oh, it's been ten months since I last got sick? Wadaya know, clean living!")
I bought two bottles of whisk(e)y just before visiting a couple of friends on Valentine's Day. One of them was Dalmore. I've described it before, but I'm not going to go into that here, partly because even with a lot of typoes, my original post on it was still readable... but also because none of us touched it that night.
The one we did open was Phillips Union, vanilla-flavored... and if you're a hardcore whiskey purist, you probably just gasped. "Blasphemy," you're probably screaming. Well, the last time I tried a crime against whisky, it was Loch Dhu, and I remember it very fondly. Sadly, I'll likely never see it again -- it's no longer in production. (Another company is apparently imitating it with something called Cú Dhub[sic], but I doubt I'll see that any time soon either.)
So, where was I? Oh, yes. Anyway, I have no idea if Phillips Union's regular stuff is any good or not, but their vanilla is frighteningly good. It's almost ridiculously smooth, with a few more sweet notes than most whiskies, but I'm sure that using vanilla to achieve that is considered cheating. Oh, well. I'm not a purist, so I'll cope. Oh, yes, I'll cope. :)
Last night, I shared it with a few friends, including my manager at work. (In fact, I left it at his apartment for a week because I was afraid I'd finish it long before anyone else got to try it.) It went over very well, except for one friend who thought it tasted like hand lotion.
For my next trick, I need to find some Creme de Cacao, and hook up a few of my UV LEDs. I have a couple of friends who've had vanilla whiskey mixed with that stuff -- apparently, the mix is a bright glowing green under ultraviolet lamps. I don't know if this particular vanilla whiskey is the right one, but hey, it'll be fun to experiment!
The last bits of dinner are steaming as I type this. Then, I eat. Then, plenty of chamomile and/or cognac to try to put myself out early, since I need to be up at about 3:30 in the fucking morning tomorrow. Hunting season starts at 6:00 tomorrow, and I'm so godsdamned motherfucking nervous right now!
I was about to start ranting and raving about this, until I decided to calm down. Perhaps the alcohol helped... have i mentioned that Dalmore is wodnerful stuff? Where I woul ddescribne other mild scotches as being like a chior singing a complexz chord, Dalmore is a single peerless soprano hitting a pefretc high note. Probably a G5, an otave and a fifth above millde C. It lacks compexith, but it has a certain perfection in its simplicity. (The alcohol, I mean. Not the singer. She doens';t even exist -- I made her up purely for her metaphotiecal value in decscirjnbuing booze. Oops. I meant "describing," not "desk-surgeon-boing.")
Where was I? Oh, yueah. Politics.
I already knwo for who mI'm going to vote. I supsect most of you, likewise, know for whom you're going to vteo. Seriosuly, any of you Obama supporters... did any of you reayyl think, "well, I wasn't going to vote for him at first, but that was such a dynamite speech, I finally decided?" And all you McCain supporters... sure, a frew of you might like his cho8ise of VPO, but I'm preyyt sure you were at leasy 9%5 sure you were going to vote for him before she was announced, right?
Speaking for myself, I've already decided. Obama is getting my vote, and will likely continue to be getting my vote from now until the day I actually pucnh a hole in my ballpt... unless he gets shot, or caught slaughhtering nuns, or something. Or unbless my fellow mad scientists in the sparky conpsoiracy finally perfect hteyr liberal mind-control lasers and turn McSame into a perfect Lirbul drone, at wehich point, sure, I'll vorte for him!
Oops. Guess I shouldn't have said that. Fuck it. It's too late for you guyd to reisist the liberal conspricay now!
Aynway, as Iw as saying... likely, most of you are silimarly committed to your White House Crittwer of choice already, just as I man to mine.
All that remians is the theater. We're going to be aruck with quire a lot of it thsi year, and no doubt new lows in campagining will eagerly be reached... and I, for one, intend to sit back and ejoy it.
One of my favorite Larry Niven short stories is one called "The Subject is Closed." In it, the Chirpsithra, an alien species far older and wiser than we are, tell a story about another race who sought the secrets of Life After Death. This race didn't have religion, but they did have the scientific method, so they constructed a whole lot of experiments, and eventually, they came up with a clear, elegant answer that was obviously correct to anyone who looked.
Then, they killed themselves, en masse. Not just the researchers, not just the scientific establishment, not just the members of one subculture. An entire species wiped itself out. When some Chirpsithra visited the planet, they found millions of corpses, many dead by their own means, others dead after having obviously waited in line for their turn with suicide machines.
Naturally, the Chirps were curious. They looked around, discovered what was being researched... and soon, these Chirps found the answer, and started killing themselves. Once some other Chirps in authority twigged onto what the hell was going on, they took special measures, arranging for a lot of the records to be "lost."
This story has a page count in the single digits, and though it's been a while since I've read it, it never fails to chill my blood.
...and on the subject of mass suicides making it into popular entertainment, I've just seen reviews of the latest M. Night Shyamalan movie, The Happening, over at Pandagon and IO9, as well as its Wikipedia article. I was originally intrigued by this movie's premise, despite the fact that armageddon awful tired of End-of-the-World movies. (Bad pun. Sorry.) I'm sick of the whole damned genre -- it's as if there's a constant drumbeat of "all us humans want to die" that movie producers never tire of tapping, and I for one refuse to contribute to their bottom line for it.
Now that I've read the reviews, though, The Happening seems like a movie I should go see drunk. After all, alcohol made Saw IV tolerable, even fun! Perhaps the reduced brain capacity and increased disorientation that come with drinking too much booze are just the thing to make this movie genuinely scary!
Because, really. The idea that all plant life on the planet hates us, and is putting out neurotoxins that make us all want to kill ourselves is pretty damned ridiculous, but it is pretty original, as far as I can tell, and it has some barely-plausible basis in reality. I'd love to see a really good writer tackle this idea... but M. Night Shyamalan is not that writer.
Still, cheap laughs and cheaper scares while shit-faced drunk in a theater! There are worse ways to spend an evening.
The first party I attended was a massive whiskey tasting, which was being held for a no-doubt-worthy charity whose name completely escapes me. For $25, you get a tour, of sorts; they ask you questions about your tastes, and then give you a sip of each of a bunch of bottles. Fortunately, I took notes, typing things in my treo as I tasted each one. (Typing has been cleaned up, and I've elaborated on a few entries. As you might imagine, the later ones became a bit sloppy.)
Pappy van Winkle smells almost too good to drink.
Talisker smells like a butterfly and stings like a big-ass wasp.
Auchentoshan smells like a rose garden and tastes like butterflies.
15-year Laphroaig is like my favorite trashy girlfriend, all grown-up and cultured.
Yamazaki is every stereotype about Japanese manners, grace, and elegance boiled down and capped in a bottle (with absolutely none of the stereotypes involving really awful porn).
Dalmore is even more gentle than Highland Park. At first, it seems to lack character and complexity, but it sneaks up on you. "Ha ha! I'm liquid crack, and now you're hooked!
Cragganmore is what Highland Park would be if it were made by people who bred orchids.
Black Bush is like regular Bushmill's, but better. I bet it would be awesome in coffee!
Eventually, I noticed that I was impaired, and recalled that I'd intended to watch what I drank at this con. When it was my turn for another taste of something, I asked the guide to pour about a third of what he'd poured me the last time, and told him I was a wussy lightweight. He agreed that he would need to cut me off soon, and my last few tastes were perhaps three or four millimeters in the bottom of a shotglass. He also made those last few count. Eventually, I thanked the hosts, went to my hotel room, took a leak, and drank several glasses of water. Then...
High Society
The next party I attended was a rather posh affair with tea, Turkish coffee (sadly without the foam, but thankfully without the grounds in the bottom of the cup), and various sweet stuff. Good stuff, all of it. Edmund may have been a treacherous prat, but I can definitely see why he liked that particular confection so much -- though personally, I preferred the baklava. I don't remember as much about this party -- more about the people I was chatting with than the party itself. Several interesting people, and I actually got to chat with them, where the tasting was a little too loud to really get to chat much.
High Notes
The third party was karaoke. This one was a small party, and not on the main party floor; someone saw me in a hallway and told me the room number, and there I went. Now, I have a few major disadvantages when it comes to popular music. One, I'm a bass, and most popular music is written for tenor. Two, if I must, I can reach notes above C4 (middle C), but I can't really hit them. And three, if I try to go from any note above C4 to any note below A3, or vice versa, my vocal cords play tricks on me. This limited my choice of songs a lot.
I could handle Billy Idol and David Bowie. U2 was harder, but I was able to do "With or without You" with little trouble. I had to drop an octave on Oingo Boingo. Apparently, though, I'm really not bad. I was thanked for showing up, profusely, the next day. The lady who ran this party assures me that next year, it will be much bigger, and she plans to have it on the party floor.
High Education
Another party had no alcohol, but it had killer conversation. I had about a half-hour chat with one gent there; we discussed mathematics, music theory, Indian music theory, and Unicode. (The last time I studied Unicode, it was limited to about 65 thousand characters. The standard has become much roomier since.) This same gent also has dreams of teaching calculus to kids in Elementary school, and by the time he finished explaining the methods he hopes to use, I was fully convinced that he could pull it off.
Once he left, I ended up discussing fan convention Urban Legends with a few other people. For instance, there's a story about a few people with a block of metallic Sodium, cutting off little specks and dropping them in the hotel swimming pool and watching them spark and dance on the surface. (Sodium reacts explosively with water. It also floats.) Then, someone dropped the whole block in, and reports vary, but either this turned the pool into a ten-story geyser, or shattered hundreds of windows facing the pool. (There are plenty of people who don't believe this one. The story about the guy dressed up in lots of peanut butter, however, is much better documented.)
I also ended up talking about pornography -- from technical and anthropological viewpoints -- with a few other people, without a single prurient thing about the conversation... and my dear god, we're such geeks!
This is why I love BayCon. The parties are great, sure. The costumes, yeah. But mostly, it's the ability to hang out, and let my hair down, with a couple thousand of my fellow geeks.
Here I am, chatting with a friend online, while enjoying two childhood pleasures: hot chocolate; and watching a fairy tale on DVD. What could be better than this?
Of course, the fairy tale in questiojn is Pan's Labyrinth, which is excellent, but not sonething you should infilct on young children, lest you give thme nightmares.
Aaaaand, the hot cholocate has a few extra ingredints in it: cardamim, connamon, cayenen pepper, and TullamoreD ew. I think I may have overdon ehta t last ingredinet just a wee bit. I'm tempetd to go back ND fix all these miskteas, and I'm sure i f I was sohber I'd do it, but ya know what>? FUCK IT!
Someone over on GAFF recommended this one to me. She described my own favorite, Laphroaig, as "tasting like band-aids smell." I also think she's a little nuts, and some of you on GAFF will probably gasp in shock that I took anything this woman said seriously. Still, I keep meaning to get a few milder whiskeys under my belt, and she obviously had a taste for the really mild ones.
This one was quite good. If we were talking about wine, I'd call this a "dessert wine." Is there such a thing as "dessert whisky?" If so, this one probably qualifies. It's a lot like Highland Park, in that it has all kinds of delicate, almost sweet overtones, but it has a little more burn on the way down. Likely, the older varieties burn less.
Buffalo Trace
Normally, I confine my boozing to scotch. Still, a couple of friends of mine gave me quite a bit of alcohol at a pre-Christmas gift exchange, so now I have, among other things, a bottle of bourbon. Fortunately, after having tried Maker's Mark and Knob Creek, I've learned that not all bourbon is as bad as Jack Daniel's. Some of it is quite good.
Buffalo Trace is excellent. It's better than Maker's Mark, though that could just be a personal preference on my part. It has hints of lots of complex sweet flavors without being disgustingly sugary the way Southern Comfort is supposed to be, and despite being 90 proof, the burning sensation is rather subdued.
One of my friends describes the perfect gift as something that you'll love, but that you would never think to get for yourself. This qualifies.
Highland Park (12 year)
I've exposed several friends to Highland Park already, but none of the friends I met over last Friday's gift exchange had ever tasted it. The thing is, I've dusted off my credit card for my holiday shopping, and I'm trying not to go too crazy with it... and $90 for a bottle of the eighteen-year, sadly, qualifies as crazy at the moment. Besides, I doubted that my own palate was good enough to tell the two apart, and was even more doubtful with respect to these particular friends.
Well, my doubts were poorly-founded. The difference is obvious. I mean, they're obviously related, and I would eagerly accept either one, don't get me wrong. The twelve-year stuff is excellent. The eighteen-year goes beyond excellent, and qualifies as liquid crack. If the twenty-five year is better by the same margin, I may be in serious trouble if I ever lay hands on it.
(I think it's not so much they taste different, but the eighteen-year is a lot gentler on the way down. The twelve-year punches you in the throat a little harder.)
Someday, I'll show these friends the eighteen-year. That'll have to wait, though. I find that the very idea of having credit card debt offends me, and I'll be killing that debt as quickly as I can, rather than incurring more of it, or buying booze with money that I could be using to pay off that debt.
It's the ghost of boozing yet-to-come...
Oh, and one last thing. The same friends who gave me the Buffalo Trace also gave me a lot of tiny bottles, mostly of things I've never tried. Some of these, like Glenfiddich, are very promising. Some of them, like Wild Turkey, scare me a little -- possibly in a good way, but I don't know yet. And at least one of them, like Johnny Walker Black, I'll be mixing with lemon, honey, and hot water the next time I get sick, because I've already tried it and have no intention of drinking it straight.
If I suddenly write a lot more posts about alcohol, it's not because I just bought a whole liquor cabinet and turned into a raging alcoholic. I'm still trying to post each new flavor as I discover it, and now I find I have 50 mL of each of lots of new flavors to try.
It's very likely that some of them will be excellent. It's equally likely that some of them will be terrible. But hey, that's what trying new things is all about!
A friend just sent me a link, and I suddenly have mixed feelings.
I'm hardly a member of PETA or anything -- life feeds on life, feeds on life, feeds on life, ad infinitum, and I fully believe that human animals have a right to a place in that cycle. Having said that, I'm sometimes disgusted by just how casually we kill other animals. Whenever I saw specials on the news about animal species being brought to the brink of extinction because they are delicacies (like shark fin soup), or because their organs have supposed aphrodisiac properties (like tiger genitals), I always wanted to throw things.
I'm not entirely without sin here: I know how animals are treated in factory farms, yet meat remains a part of my diet. Still, even to an admitted omnivore, this seems pretty clear-cut. Your nourishment might be worth an animal's life. Your epicurean tastes, and your hard-on, are not. (I'm using the broad, general "you" here, obviously.) Any gourmet chef who can't make a luxurious, decadent soup without shark fins doesn't deserve to be called a gourmet chef, even if his shark fin soup is the most amazing meal ever. And any man who's willing to see a tiger dead to get a hard-on doesn't deserve to be called a man, even if his tiger-fueled hard-on can puncture a steel door.
So, when I discovered this product, my first response should have been disgust. My exotic drink is not worth an animal's life, even if the animal in question isn't one of the cute ones that PETA actually cares about. Further, this particular exotic drink seems to be potentially dangerous.
And yet, my first reaction to it was, "wow, a bottle of spicy whiskey with a cobra in it! And the review says it might kill me. That's so cool! I bet it tastes amazing!"
I won't be buying one of these. I will admit that I am tempted, though.
(I'm amused that, on the website that sells these things, they ascribe aphrodisiac properties not only to their exotic Thai cobra whiskey, but to their California king snake liquor as well. Truly the natural world abounds with turn-ons!)
I visited a few friends, and exchanged gifts with them. One of these friends usually wraps his gifts with a hundred feet of duct tape, but this year decided against it. Just as well -- those were a pain to open in years past. For my part, I wrapped all my gifts in cut-up brown paper bags, and then labeled them by name: "[Friend's] XXX-Mas Present!"
(For those of you who don't know, if you mail order pornography or sex toys, they will be sent "discretely packaged," presumably so that your postman and neighbors won't find out what an OMFGPervert you are. Usually, this means plain brown wrappers.)
I gave rum, the new edition of the movie Labyrinth, diabetic-safe chocolate, books, and games. I received a game that I'm already dying to show silverkun at BayCon (if we don't meet earlier than that), enough alcohol that it will take me at least three months to finish it, and two DVDs: Hogfather and Day Watch (unrated edition). These last two DVDs are things I wanted to buy for myself, but this is why you don't buy things for yourself around the holidays -- because your friends often know quite well what you'll want, and then where will you be when you have two copies of something?)
Overall, everyone there said "thank you, this is so fuckin' cool!" a lot, and really, what more can you ask for than that? :)
I started watching Day Watch, but was too tired to finish it last night. They've added a whole bunch of little bits, which vary from "really damned cool" to "kinda slow, but they still add to the overall film." Sadly, the subtitles are completely ordinary. Perhaps the creatively-edited subtitles are a feature I need to figure out how to turn on. Either way, the movie is still amazing.
I haven't started watching Hogfather yet. I'm told it's really long, so I want to set aside a few hours for it, curl up in front of my computer with hot chocolate, and make a whole night of it. Of course, this is me, so I'll be finding a grown-up recipe for hot chocolate that involves either alcohol or red pepper first. Perhaps both.)
The last couple of times I got sick, I coped by buying a bottle of Bushmill's, a bottle of lemon juice, and a bottle of honey. This time, out of boredom, I tried Earl Grey with Drambuie, followed by lemon tea with enough fresh grated ginger in it that I almost needed to drink the tea with a fork. I feel great!
Two of these are things I should have written up a while ago -- the third is one I tried lately. Anyway...
MacAllan (12 Year)
I tried this one a while ago, before I bought that bottle of Laphroaig. For some reason, I never got around to writing about it.
This one is... I'm not sure. It's good stuff, obviously, but I have a feeling that this one is a sort of "default" flavor for scotch. Aside from being very good, there wasn't all that much that was interesting about it. This one would be a good one for parties, since it seems to be a happy medium between the wonderfully almost-delicate flavors (such as Highland Park) and the wonderfully kick-ass-and-take-names flavors (such as Lagavulin and Laphroaig), and therefore likely to please everybody.
It's good, but it's not one of my favorites.
Maker's Mark (Bourbon)
In the comments of my post on Jack Daniel's, a few of you mentioned Maker's Mark favorably. So, I tried it. It's sorta like Jack Daniel's, except that it's good. Very good, actually. This one, I'd actually drink again.
(One of you compared it to Highland Park. I can definitely see the comparison: the same hints of sweetness, and the same remarkable lack of alcohol burn. I prefer Highland Park of the two, but Maker's Mark is still very damned good.)
Taaka (Vodka)
I visited a friend who was drinking this, and out of morbid curiosity, I asked to try a sip. He handed me his glass, and a can of Red Bull (or some such). This should have warned me not to try it, but hey, curiosity. So, I took a sip, and chased it with energy drink as quickly as I could.
I don't know what this shit it, but it ain't vodka. I'd suggest that this stuff might be improperly labeled rubbing alcohol, except that rubbing alcohol tastes better. Obviously, someone's made a mistake and mislabeled a bottle of industrial solvent of some kind. Either that, or diesel fuel. Or maybe paint thinner.
I imagine that Taaka sells for the same reason that malt liquor sells -- it's cheap and it will get you drunk.
I've complained about how I have difficulty in obtaining truly spicy curry before, right? Well, occasionally, I run into a waiter who I suspect is out to teach me a lesson -- "so, this white boy thinks he can handle spicy food? I'll show 'im!" And then, he tells the cook that I said something rude about his mother, and the cook decides to prepare my food so that one taste will nuke me from orbit.
And then I try it, and almost have an orgasm on the spot. And on these occasions, I've been known to leave a tip that's bigger than the bill.
Up until now, I thought that this experience was limited to Thai or Indian curry. Now I see it carries over to whiskey as well. This is the first bottle I've bought without using gift certificates, and I am delighted to have chosen this one. Laphroaig obviously translates from the local Gaelic to "oh my fucking god it burns!" (Starts singing in a drunken impression of John Mellencamp:) "It burns so goood! Oooh baby, it burns so good!"
How could I not love it?
(I have another experiment to write up: MacAllan, 12 year. I don't know why I haven't gotten around to that one yet...)
"I've been invited to a Swedish Midsummer party, and frankly, I'm terrified. I've been told it involves eating raw fish, drinking copious amounts of vodka and dancing round a big phallus while I pretend to be a frog."
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drunk