The Gathering o’ the Mustelids
So, why does Clan Weasel gather here every year? This is why: the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games, the largest Scottish games outside Scotland. It started in 1956, about the same time my father and grandfather built the original hunting cabin on the side of the mountain. My dad hasn’t missed the games since.
He hasn’t been to the actual games in years (and neither have I, for that matter). But he wears the tartan hat with the ribbons and deedly-ball on, and stumps around rolling his R’s and saying “wha hae!” and drinking whiskey.
The joke is, as far as anyone knows, there’s not a drop of Scots blood in my dad. He descends from a line of pasty English people who were deported to Virginia in the 18th Century for either religious nutcasery or poaching, depending on who you ask.
My mother’s family traces its origins to a Scot, however. Clan MacStoat will be there. I think our clan motto is “another wee dram won’t kill me.”
When I were a puppy, some damn fool bought me the whole suit, with the jacket and the knee socks and everything. I loved that thing. I swaggered around in it long after I’d outgrown it. By the end, I bobbled out of the seams like some obscene tartan sausage.
There will be ALL KINDS of merchandise on offer up the mountain. If you’re bored some day, pick a Scots surname and Google for the original version of the family coat of arms, and compare it to the Americanized version. The American version always has twice as much shit on it, with extra tinsel and sparklies and unicorns and orcs. Like it came out of the Society for Creative Anachronism’s prom decoration committee.
And that’s what we’re not doing Tuesday.
July 10, 2007 — 1:18 am
Comments: 49
Escaped!
Hello! I am not here! I was here when I wrote this, but now you’re reading it, so I must be gone! Yes, through the miracle of deferred posting, I can communicate with you, my minions, even though I’m four days in the past and/or nowhere near a wifi access point!
“Nowhere near a wifi access point!?” you exclaim, wetting yourself with terror and confusion. “Wherever can that be in this modern age of instantaneous digital communication?”
I am at the family cabin, way, way back in the hills. If I visit the folks while they’re here, I can wear nothing but jeans and t-shirts and they don’t make that “L is for Loser” sign at me.
So four days from now, which will be yesterday by today, I flew into the Tri-Cities airport and met my cousin, who drove up from Alabama. We do this every year, so I can tell you exactly how it went (will go) down.
We drove into the tanktown where I was born to visit my grandparents’ house. We agreed that it looked quite small compared to our memories of it, but that the current owners are taking good care of it. Only, they really shouldn’t have cut that tree down.
Then we went and stood on my grave and I said, “ha ha! Get me! I’m standing on my own grave!” My grandfather sold the old family farm to a cemetary and got a family plot and first dibs on the location as part of the deal. He chose a hillside he used to plow when he was a teenager. He and my grandmother and assorted Weasels are there, but somehow their headstones are jammed up against the headstones of the neighbors, so it looks like they were buried standing up. I hope they don’t bury me standing up; I suspect I’ll be awfully tired.
Finally, we head up into the mountains. Along the way, we stop and buy liquor. It’s not that there won’t be liquor at the cabin. There will be a very great deal of liquor at the cabin. But if you bring your own, nobody can tell how much you drink. Plus, I can get Jack Daniel’s Green Label here, and I can’t back home. I like it. It hurts.
My folks won’t get here until tomorrow, which is today now. I’ll tell you about that in a minute, four days ago, which will be tomorrow by then.
July 9, 2007 — 1:11 am
Comments: 38
Tribes
Primates are tribal. Drop a bunch of us on the savannah, and we promptly coagulate into angry screaming monkeyclumps and start a war.
It’s been fun watching this play out online. I’ve been here since the mid eighties, from local bulletin boards, Fidonet and PCPursuit, to Prodigy, GEnie, Compu$erve and Arbornet, from USENET to IRC to online games to Web bulletin boards to blogs. I sat down a decade ago and started to write down all the groups I’d been a part of and handles I’d posted under and I got well over 50 of the one and 100 of the other before I lost interest in the question.
The internet is particularly well suited to tribal warfare. It is a slippery place; only a “place” at all in the most metaphorical way. It’s a suitable place for anonymity, intrigue and imposture. It’s a billion timbreless voices whispering to each other in the dark.
The thing I most loved to read on USENET was the sputtering indignation of a newbie who suddenly realizes that, yes, that other guy damn well can talk to you that way and no, there’s not a thing you can do about it. But, of course, this is why internet arguments never die: they don’t have to. There is no mechanism to declare a winner and go home.
Except when there is. And moderated groups and bulletin boards tend to generate the hardest feelings of all. Moderation is a job almost impossible to do gracefully. Most places it’s like romping through a toe factory with a hammer.
I have hung out in happy places and cranky places and contributed as lavishly as I was able to the happiness and the crankiness thereof, if not always the right way around. I’ve been so busy identifying and supporting my online tribe, it totally snuck up on me, that point where I came to identify more with the online tribe than the meat tribe.
Oh, I trim my hedges and say hi to my neighbors. I vote. I shop. If the Redcoats ever come back, I’ll run to the barricades with my carbine (getting tired of keeping up my marksmanship skill in preparation for that glorious day, in fact). But if you ask me where I live, work and play, the answer to all three is on the computer. And, pretty much, online. I blame broadband. What’s satellite wifi going to do?
Leave a mark on the genome, is my guess.
June 12, 2007 — 1:52 pm
Comments: 14
Booze of the Day: Bellini
It can’t be champagne every day. Oh, no. Sometimes, it’s only sparkling wine.
B had one of these with a client and thought it was very nice. It’s a Bellini: prosecco, an Italian sparkling wine, and peach juice. For the record, two parts prosecco and one part peach juice (or peach pureé). A couple of raspberries or strawberries floating in it is very nice, too. Refreshing on a hot day.
Something about this nagged at me, until I realized…I blogged this cocktail last Thanksgiving.
Yes, it’s true. Even I learn things from S. Weasel.
May 25, 2007 — 12:00 pm
Comments: 3
Booze of the Day: Veuve Clicquot
Back on the fizz tonight. We turned up an ancient bottle of Veuve Clicquot what B here was given for a long-ago birthday. Some sites will tell you not to hold champagne for more than six months or a year; a woman at a local winery told us you can hold non-vintage champagne for several years and it will improve (and vintage even longer). This stuff? Not vintage and could be as old as a decade. No way to know. But Veuve Clicquot is a decent brand, so we had to give it a sample.
Nicole-Barbe Ponsardin married François Clicquot (dabbler in champagne, banking and wool) in 1798, but he died seven years later, leaving her in control of the company. “Veuve” means “widow.” She guided everything toward champagne production. In fact, the factory production methods she pioneered went a long way toward establishing champagne as the preferred tipple of European royalty.
Today, it’s…top end of average. Just below vintage. In the £30 range.
This bottle? A little worse for wear. A little flat. A little dark. Eminenly drinkable. I give it
three and a half drunken weasels, even past its best.
At the Wikipedia article on Veuve Clicquot, I found this neat picture of the various sizes of champagne bottle, which I nicked and captioned. For your boozing edification:
May 22, 2007 — 6:10 pm
Comments: 4
Beer of the Day: Adnam’s Broadside
Beer: Broadside Strong Original
Brewery: Adnams
Alcohol: 6.3%
Pros: 6.3%!!!
Cons: Hippies.
I confess. It was the alcohol content that caught my eye on this one. But it was a nice dark red color, so it went in the basket.
Adnam’s brewery is in Southwold, a little fishing village up the coast from London. Well, it was a little fishing village. Now it’s a little yuppie village, I gather. The first record of brewing at the Swan Inn dates to 1345, when Johanna de Corby was fined for selling beer in unmarked measures (weights and measures legislation in the UK goes back kzillions of years; she was probably selling unmarked buckets o’ beer).
The whole town burned to the ground in 1659 and the Swan was rebuilt the following year. So it’s kind of the New Swan. The brewery is still in the yard behind.
A Google search for Adnam’s turns up their site with the phantom description: “A traditional brewer of classic English beer, with a very modern web site, with more style than substance (the beers have both).” That odd sentence must have been from an early “holding” page before the site went live. Bad idea.
The actual web site is worse. It’s a great smelly load of hippie marketing bollocks. Like, the Our Values page, which shows a row of pebbles with words like “sustainability” and “diversity” and “community” embossed on them, and you click the pebbles to learn that “we want fulfilled customers and employees, whose lives are enriched by their involvement with Adnams” and “we aim to manage our impact positively on the social, natural, and built environment.” The built environment. That’s a new one.
Then there’s their Too Much of a Good Thing campaign.
Confident that great beers and distinctive wines enhance the quality of life, we are determined to promote their sale in responsible ways. Our aim is to encourage more people to drink Adnams, not for individuals to drink more – and all our marketing is consistent with that approach.
During the past year we have also worked closely with local organisations and young people to produce informative ‘alco-cards’ and an educational video (partly financed by a grant from Arts & Business), undertaken widespread staff training, held discussions with our pub tenants and the police, produced clear and informative leaflets and devised a subtle variant on our ‘Beer from the Coast’ campaign.
Further work is in hand to improve the clarity of information on the back labels of our beers and wines. All of which is brought together with a simple strapline – ‘Remember, you can have too much of a good thing’.
Informative alco-cards. Sweet Jesus, I need a drink.
The beer? Oh. Strong, very bitter. I liked it. I don’t know why I keep buying a beverage called “bitters” and reacting with shock, “hey, this stuff is bitter!” I would have given it three and a half drunken weasels, but I took half a drunken weasel away because…you know. Hippies.
three drunken weasels.
— 7:49 am
Comments: 10
Beer of the Day: Fursty Ferret
Beer: Fursty Ferret
Brewery: Hall and Woodhouse
Alcohol: 4.4%
Pros: It has ferrets all over it!
Cons: Tastes distinctly of ferret.
I had the t-shirt, time to sample the beer.
Have you ever picked up a product and suddenly felt the warm throb of a marketing drone humping your shin? Such a product is Fursty Ferret. Here’s the back label:
When in decades past the idyllic country home of Miss Rose Gribble became a local inn, legend has it that the inquisitive local ferrets frequented the pub’s back door on a mission to sample its own reputed brew. In their honour it was named Fursty Ferret, and today it’s brewed in greater quantity — so now you can enjoy the celebrated ale that still eludes the ferrets of Gribble Inn.
I think I just fwowed up a little. England is an exotic land, but insufficiently exotic to support roving bands of alcoholic ferrets congregating behind hotels to cadge beer. More’s the pity. Still, my favorite beers are dark red bitters, and this one looked like Mr Goodferret.
The label describes it as sweet and hoppy. I found it bitter and skunky. Which is, I suppose, entirely appropriate.
“Skunking” is what it’s called when light strikes beer and transforms some junk in the hops with a big chemical name into a sulfur compound very similar to eau du skonk. Skunking can happen in less than a minute in clear glass bottles exposed to sunlight; it happens in dark brown bottles exposed to fluorescent light, too, but it takes a few days. Which means that pretty much every import you’ve ever drunk from a glass bottle is at least a touch skunked. It might even be fair to say that a whiff of pong is a proper and intended part of the bottled beer experience.
Well. It’s not like I was going to pour it down the sink. I give it:
two and a half drunken weasels.
May 21, 2007 — 1:00 am
Comments: 1
Four bottles of fizz and the world biggest chocolate Easter bunny
Right! We made it! And I got my wifi working!
To kick off Weasel’s Birthday Fortnight (yes, my actual birthday was toward the beginning of the month. This here’s the celebration), I was presented with this fucking ginormous Lindt bunny and several bottles of excellent champers.
The hooch on the far right above is, I think, my favorite. It’s Heidsieck Monopole Blue Top. It was the official champagne of the maiden voyage of the Titanic (which, as you may have heard, was the only voyage of the Titanic). I didn’t know this when I decided it was my favorite, so it’s…fate, not posturing.
Heidsieck Monopole Blue Top is kosher. And not plain old kosher for Passover, but extra specially jewy kosher. I’m a little unclear what that means, but you’ll find the exhaustive account here. Me, I’m only Jewish when the Jehovah’s Witnesses come ’round. I was christened a Presbyterian.
In 1916, a Heidsieck-laden ship bound for Russia was torpedoed by the Germans in the Gulf of Finland. It turned up again in 1998 and over 2,000 bottles of vintage 1907 fizz have been salvaged from it. The water’s cold, the bottles are apparently still drinkable.
This isn’t one of those. It’s an ordinary bottle from the supermarket, but it sure am fine.
And there. That’s the last drop.
Meanwhile, I see you knuckleheads have been writing haiku and trying to trip Akismet. None of it made it into the spam filter, but I suppose you know that by now. It doesn’t seem to care about naughty words. I think it hones in pretty exclusively on links. More than two are guaranteed quarantine.
But, hey, knock yourselves out. You’re welcome to post any wirty dords you like and see what sticks. (You know, I don’t think “wirty dords” really works all that well in print).
May 17, 2007 — 8:03 pm
Comments: 8
Notable by its absinthe
Hey, somebody in New York worked out how to make a street legal absinthe. Per their website (warning: tinkly piano music) they expect to ship the first bottles to New York City and the Hamptons at the end of this month.
Absinthe is made with wormwood, one constituent of which — thujone — is what makes the drink illegal in the US. Thujone is a GABA receptor antagonist; it causes convulsions at high levels and is regulated in most places. Absinthe with thujone levels below 10 parts per million is still legal in many European countries, and is imported pretty freely. This new manufacturer made absinthe per several 19th Century recipes and discovered that the thujone levels in the traditional article were really quite small. Once eliminated entirely the FDA permitted them to go ahead.
A lot of crap is talked about absinthe in general, and thujone in particular. The latter has roughly the molecular shape of THC and was thought to act similarly. It does not. Absinthe is supposed to cause drunkenness with clarity; visual saturation; hallucinations, even. I always heard it burnt out your optic nerves and you went bliiind. As near as I can tell, it’s all booollshit. Absinthe was just the Reefer Madness of la Belle Epoch.
I had to have some. I bought a big pyramidal bottle of the stuff for stupid money in England one year. I was like, “get me! I’m the world’s tallest Toulouse-Lautrec!”
The absinthe ritual is very particular: an ounce of vile green liqueur is poured into a glass. A slotted spoon is balanced across the top of the glass with a sugar cube poised in the middle. Slowly, drop by drop, ice water is dripped over the sugarcube and into the glass until the contents go from green to swirly, opalescent white.
Screw that. It’s just liquor and sugarwater. I drank mine on the rocks.
Despite having ingested my fair share of illicit chemicals, I have the same reaction every time. The moment I swallow, it’s like, “Oh my god you stupid fucking monkey, what have you done? It’s inside you now!!!”
After a couple of ounces, I thought, “Heyyyy…I know this sensation. It’s…alcohol!”
Feels like booze, looks like mouthwash, tastes like licorice. Jesus, how I hate licorice.
Further reading: the Virtual Absinthe Museum is fun. Apparently, old bottles of pre-ban absinthe are forever turning up in Europe, and they will sell you an ounce or two. They don’t tell you what it costs, which tells you what it costs. These people are good, too. They run another pricetag free site that sells nothing but bottles of assorted hooch older than fifty years.
May 9, 2007 — 5:09 am
Comments: 11
Hey, Pups. Let me buy you a drink!
Drink it fast or drink it slow,
But your lips have gotta touch the toe.
I can’t remember where I first read about the Sour Toe Cocktail, the liquorous specialty of Dawson’s Hotel in the Yukon. The original toe belonged to a rumrunner, Otto Liken, who got frostbite fleeing the Mounties with a load of merchandise. He and his brother holed up in a moonshine shack and Otto got blotto so Louie could amputate the frozen digit before it went gangrenous.
They put the toe in a jar of rum and let it mellow in the shack for, like, fifty years until the building was bought by “Captain” Dick Stevenson, a local fleecer of tourists. The cocktail was his idea. He loaned the toe to a local bar and dared tourists to drink from a glass filled with booze (of their choice) and The Toe as a way of proving themselves worthy of the Yukon. He was repaid in drinks.
About 30,000 suckers have “done the toe.”
The original toe — and several subsequent ones — was accidentally swallowed. But such is the generosity of the human spirit that surgically amputated toes are forever offered as replacements.
I consider it no accident that an article about doing the toe should surface in the Toronto Star just in time for Pupster’s 40th birthday.
Dude. Lemme buya drink. It was meant to be.
April 16, 2007 — 8:00 am
Comments: 14