May 2007

More Movie Fun

A couple of vids caught my eye today that I thought were worth sharing.
Enjoy.

There's nothing that'll make me laugh more than an instance of schadenfreude  And for my money, the best of the genre features a little self inflicted pain misfortune at the heart of it. I mean, be honest--would you rather watch 10 "guy-gets-hit-in-the-nuts" videos or a single "guy-hits-himself-in-the-nuts" clip?
I Thought so.
Or as Mel Brooks put it: "Tragedy is if I cut my finger....Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die."
Baby + Self Inflicted Pain = Comedic Gold!
So here's a little clip of a baby discovering a lemon.

Luc's First Lemon 

After I wiped the tears from my eyes, somewhere around the 4th or 5th viewing, I started seeing something deeper, like I was peering into the primordial ooze itself and I thought I caught a glimpse of something hardwired into our collective DNA. (Or I could have just been high on huge bursts of serotonin from watching this over and over.) There's something innate that is tantalized by citrus, that draws us to it, and yet repels; something in our firmware that makes us desire that razor ride between pleasure and pain. Even as little tabula rasas covered in meaty pudge, the Citrus Grove sings to us her Siren's Song.....
So is it any wonder that lemons and limes feature so prominently in so many of our cocktails? Whether as the lead voice in Daiquiris, Margaritas and Sours of all kinds, or in a supporting role in Cosmopolitans, Cuba Libres or simple Gin and Tonics, the welcome bite of citrus distracts us while Mr. Alcohol's blunt cudgel works its magic.
So Thank You, Luc, for giving us a window into our nature, you little tow-headed, cow-licked dickens, you.

Or maybe it's just a video of a big dumb baby.

Our second film is an SNL sketch about buying beer when your under 21. In light of the Portland PD's recent and much publicized sting operations, this was even funnier for me. Chris Busby at The Bollard has been following the ongoing shenanigans with a jaundiced eye and my favorite detail of the whole nightmare ordeal was when the cops asked the City Council to raise the rates for liquor licenses. The proceeds, of course, would be used to finance sting operations against liquor sellers.
Rich.

The Howl Jones Price Index

As a collector of old books relating to the application of alcoholic spirits upon the human spirit, I spend a fair amount of time scouring eBay, ABE and Alibris, as well as some of the darker corners of the web. For instance, I recently found a cache of Soule Smith's The Mint Julep, (4th edition) for sale but I'm gonna keep the details to myself, for now. Not only are these sites target rich environments for acquiring things, but they're invaluable for assessing the current values of things already got. EBay is a particularly good resource for valuation-- it's literally the New York Stock Exchange of America's junk.

Here are some recent eBay sales that have caught my eye.

Jerry Thomas 1887 $307.00
This caught my eye for 2 reasons: The price (!) of course and it was mis-identified as "Terry" Thomas in the listing. I'm curious if the price would have been higher without the typo.

George Kappeler "Modern American Drinks"  $161.00
In my 10 or more years on eBay I don't recall ever seeing this book, nor have I seen it on ABE or Alibris. Another pretty bad listing from a seller who most likely had no idea what she had. There were only 60 or so page views for this item, and I know I can account for about 15 of them. Yes, I won it.

Oscar Haimo "Cocktail Digest" 1943  $51.00
I've got a small selection of Haimo's books and this one somehow slipped past me. I thought I had the cat by the whiskers when I scored a Cocktail Digest from 1944, (it would become the Cocktail and Wine Digest in '45) but this is something else altogether. Haimo was one interesting cat, if his autobiography Nothing Lasts Forever is to be believed. After getting rejected by numerous publishers, Haimo self-published the Digest with the proceeds from a cocktail competition. He did all the artwork himself and his is one of the first published recipes for the Moscow Mule that I'm aware.

Bartender's Guide and Song Book $80.00
This is one of those Prohibition era books that jauntily eulogizes the good ol' saloon. It's replete with the recipes found in the demised saloon and the songs that accompanied them. You may have recognized the fellow on the cover: he got "Doctored" up by Ted "Doctor Cocktail" Haigh and was trotted out to help promote a lot of MoTAC 's events and announcements.
The dedication still resonates:
Published in sacred memory of those good old days when bartending was an exact science, and you could forget your troubles on any corner.

Bottoms Up $81.00
This just caught me flat footed.

Ted Saucier's "Bottoms Up" $4.99
Flat footed again. Here's an instance where a book listed in a less than optimum category fell into the hands of a very (very) lucky person. The book isn't valuable, nor is it particularly rare but this copy looks absolutely mint-y and it comes with an equally pristine slip cover. Probably worth $50-$75 but an absolute steal at $5.00!

The Savoy Cocktail Book $405.00
The Savoy Cocktail Book is one of the most collectible cocktail books out there and for a number of good reasons. It's a great resource for the cocktail historian but it's also just a beautiful thing to look at and hold--a true object of the cocktailian arts. This is simply an amazing specimen for a collector. Here we have a 1st edition, in really good condition and it's inscribed by Himself. The famous "Bacardi Cocktail" addendum is intact, and did I mention already that Harry Craddock signed it?

Holy Hanna, it's been awhile

Hello All,

Sorry so few (alright, no) posts in a while, but I warned you at the outset that I was a lazy procrastinator And while that's still true, this latest bit of silence is brought to you courtesy of an opposite impulse. I was feeling ambitious and started doing a little Spring cleaning on the ol' HardDrive when I apparently moved or renamed (or more likely, deleted) a little tiny 2Kb file that must have been fairly important to the upkeep and maintainance of this here patch of Blogistan. In the future, I will not touch files with inscrutable names like XC00BF197.dll, so help me God. Hopefully everything is working again, and if you're reading this, than it is. So you can expect a veritable spray of new material in the next few days, but don't get used to it-- you can count on me to get lazy as sure as you can count on the Red Sox to go into a slump after the All Star Break.

I'd all but finished a big and long post for last Saturday about the Mint Julep, replete with themes of heritages lost, traditions stolen and the rise of The Kentucky Mint Julep Hegemony. But that ship, as we say, has sailed. So I'll spare you the details. There is a story about Mint Juleps that surrounds our spiritual mascot, General Neal Dow, however.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Dow, a reformed Quaker, financed formed a regiment of Tee-Totaling Mainers, who found their way into the campaign to secure New Orleans. Upon his arrival in the Crescent City, Dow checked into the City Hotel, where he paints this vignette in one of his letters home.

"The head waiter, a darkey, is a character, and is very deferential to the 'General', and hopes he is 'comfortable.' This afternoon he brought me a pitcher of ice water, and, with Landlord Woodward's compliments, a tumbler of mint julep, iced, minted and dusted with pulverized sugar and with a glass tube, 'all ready.' He waited as if to see me take it, but I told him to set it down, which he did. Just before dinner, he came up to notify me that dinner was almost ready, and, seeing the julep said: 'Oh, dat's all dead now!'
'Well,' I said, 'I never drink at all.'
'Ah, I tought you was one o' dem dat indulged.'
'No, I never do.'
'Oh, all right.'
'Yes, I mean to keep all right' Exit waiter with the 'dead' julep, to appear probably at the bar with an empty glass."

The insinuation here, of course, is that the waiter surreptitiously downed the 'dead' julep on his way to the bar. Unbeknownst to the general, however, a New York City journalist was sitting in the lobby and recognized Dow, the most famous Tee-Totaler of the day. His account goes something like this:

"A day or two ago my eyes were attracted by a diminutive little man, carrying the significant shoulder-strap of a brigadier-general. I had great confidence in his skill and courage and in his military knowledge...... The general came to my hotel and proceeded upstairs. In a few moments, the attentive landlord, hearing that he had a live brigadier-general in the house, without asking the clerk for his name, only asked for his number, which obtaining, said landlord rushed into the bar-room, and had a julep mixed, of standard strength, and ornamented with an immense amount of 'greens', which ostentatiously stuck up, making the 'institution' look more like a flower-pot than a genial beverage. This chemical and vegetable combination, sustained by a waiter of unusual politeness, was handed in at '21' with the landlord's compliments.
In due course of time, the tumbler returned as dry as a gourd, the mint all wilted; in fine, it seemed as if a sirocco had passed over it. And what of that? Only, gentle reader, that the general was General Neal Dow, the author of the Maine Liquor Law, the commander at Fort Jackson, whose orderly, no doubt, appropriated to himself the landlord's hospitality."

Thus from little acorns, minor scandals are born. As one wag put it:

"This is frightful. Neal Dow, who but a few years ago was not contented unless all mankind foreswore eternal enmity to mint juleps and all other peculiar 'vanities' compounded by liquor sellers; Neal Dow, who called out the police of Portland to shut up the liquor-shops; Neal Dow, who was never weary of poking his nose into other people's business, like a true New Englander; Neal Dow, succumbing before the seductive influence of a mint julep. Oh, tell it not in Gath, and proclaim it not in New England!"