http://www.premodern.org/nat Tue, 11 Dec 2007 04:19:17 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've been meaning to post about this for a while, but finally getting around to making the homemade grenadine mentioned at Tea Leaves jogged my memory and reminded me to mention it. There's a bar near my house called Kelly's that we go to sometimes, especially after work. It's a little hole-in-the-wall place that happens to have surprisingly good food and cocktails. Notably, they actually know how to mix real cocktails instead of just looking at you dumbfounded if you order anything more complicated than a rum and coke. For example, they're about the only place I've found in town that can make a decent Sidecar. During one post-work happy hour, they had little drink cards at the tables from LUPEC, ’Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails'. Laura ordered a Firefly from it, loved it, and I've been pressed into service making them ever since. It's a simple drink, but quite tasty: 1 1/2 oz vodka 2 oz grapefruit juice 1 tsp of grenadine Shake it up with ice, and strain into a rocks glass with crushed ice. I tend to make them as spritzers, topped with some club soda. They're good with fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice and the Stirrings pomegranate grenadine, but absolutely great with homemade grenadine. For the grenadine, I basically followed Pete's recipe, but cooked it to 225 degrees instead of 230 so it wasn't quite as sweet. Mmm. http://www.premodern.org/nat/archives/2007/12/10/firefly/ Laura and I are at the hockey game, and during a TV timeout a couple minutes ago they do a little 'Iceburgh Goes To School' segment where the team mascot goes to a local elementary school with a cameraman in tow and asks the various adorable moppets questions. Okay, fine, cute enough. So the first question is "Where do penguins live?" Sure, that makes sense, the team mascot's a huge freakish cartoon penguin. But then EVERY SINGLE KID says "up north where it's cold!" or "the north pole!" Not one knows the answer. So I ask you: is our children learning? http://www.premodern.org/nat/archives/2007/09/28/is-our-children-learning/ I think weblog posting from a new iPhone is near-mandatory, yes? So far I'm about as happy as I expected to be, which is very. http://www.premodern.org/nat/archives/2007/07/25/my-iphone-and-i-will-be-very-happy-together/ First: Laura made a delicious asparagus curry with chickpea pancakes for dinner tonight. Highly recommended if you like Indian food. And, well, if you don't, what the hell is wrong with you? Indian food is delicious. Second: I picked up a bottle of Tanqueray Rangpur gin, which is a newish gin distilled with Rangpur limes, ginger, and bay leaves. It's stunningly good in a simple gin and tonic, and it also made the best martini I've ever had: six parts tanqueray rangpur gin one part dry vermouth one-half part orange bitters I tend to like my martinis on the wet side (as my friend Peter would say, otherwise it's just a big glass of gin), and I've recently fallen in love with the old-style addition of orange bitters. The slight lime flavor of the Rangpur mixed incredibly well with the orange, and the whole thing is just wonderfully smooth and tasty. Definitely pick some up if you can. http://www.premodern.org/nat/archives/2007/05/27/two-things/ As has been reported by approximately every possible source, Kurt Vonnegut died last night. From A Man Without A Country: I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now." That's my favorite joke. Fair enough. Kurt is up in heaven now. http://www.premodern.org/nat/archives/2007/04/12/kurt-vonnegut/ As of a week ago today I have been slaving in the orchards of my dark masters for a year. That is all. http://www.premodern.org/nat/archives/2007/04/09/belated-note/ Work's stressful these days. Liquor helps. Specifically, pretentious antique liquor. I picked up a vintage cocktail book last year and have steadily been drinking my way through it. Highly recommended. http://www.premodern.org/nat/archives/2007/03/14/vintage-cocktails-i-have-loved/ So Laura and I wanted to buy a TV recently. We'd been meaning to get a nice shiny HDTV for a while, and when I screwed up my W-4 withholding and ended up with a large tax return, it was the perfect opportunity. We looked around online and in stores, and settled on a nice Sharp LCD. Unsurprisingly, the best prices were online, but Best Buy's website showed a fairly close price and wouldn't need a week or so to ship it to us. So after a bit of dithering, we traipsed down to the local Best Buy to pick one up, since their site claimed that store had the thing in stock. When we got there, the price wasn't what we expected -- suddenly it was $200 higher than it'd been the previous night online. We complained to a salesman, who assured us that their sales end Sunday morning. That seemed a bit odd, but we had no reason not to trust him, especially since he showed us the online price, and it matched what the store offered. We resisted his pressure to buy the thing and wandered off, hunting around through different stores and finally finding the right price at Circuit City. Things happen, we thought, and we should have been quicker about buying the TV when we saw the online price. Turns out I shouldn't have been so trusting about the "see, it's the same price online" maneuver: http://www.premodern.org/nat/archives/2007/03/03/how-i-almost-got-scammed-by-best-buy/ It's true. I gave in to temptation and bought a Wii from eBay earlier this week, and the nice FedEx man dropped it off on my porch this morning. My copy of Zelda and the second controller set I ordered haven't showed up, so I spent a while playing with Wii Sports and the Virtual Console stuff. I honestly can't remember the last time I had this much fun with a video game. The sports games are clearly mini-games, and they don't have a lot of depth or a ton of graphical polish, but they're just flat-out fun. Nintendo claimed that people cared less about shiny HD graphics than about gameplay, and from a morning's time spent with Wii Sports, I'm pretty sure they're right. http://www.premodern.org/nat/archives/2006/11/24/nintendo-may-in-fact-own-me/ This year Laura got me a nice shaving kit for my birthday. Fancy shaving brush, old-school metal safety razor, imported British shaving cream, the whole deal. It's all very nice, but by far the absolute best part is the shaving scuttle. It's essentially a double-walled ceramic shaving mug, with a nicely sized inner compartment for working up lather and an outer compartment for hot water to keep everything warm. On its own it's a very pretty piece of handmade pottery, but when it's filled with hot water and a good shaving cream it magically transforms into the best thing ever. I'd read people raving about hot lather shaves and had sort of dismissed it as the usual shavegeek hyperbole, but it turns out that it's all true. Specifically, this bit from Shaveblog turns out to be absolutely 100% accurate: What you do need is hot lather. Oh man do you need hot lather! Hot lather is why men fight wars, son. Not for democracy. Not for oil. We fight wars to decide who gets to shave with hot lather and who doesn’t. If you’ve never shaved with hot lather you won’t understand, and if you have, you do. If you have any sort of facial hair, do yourself a favor and buy a shaving scuttle immediately. If you don't, consider buying one for your closest acquaintance who does. It's basically heaven. http://www.premodern.org/nat/archives/2006/06/24/birthday-lather/