I'ts been a long week (or three or four)
There's nothing like a little turmoil and upheaval to throw a guy off
his game. Some out-of-town clownishness, some going-away parties and the
abrupt and unceremonious closing of my place of employ have all
conspired to keep me from my blog. My apologies to all and sundry,
especially the legions that popped over here after Paul's too kind post
last month.
Sudden unemployment is an occuptional hazard for the
career bartender and we all deal with it in different ways. My
traditional regimen consists of a mixture of road trips, boozily
acting-out, wrecking the apartment and laying on the couch to watch the
cavalcade of court shows. Thumb-sucking is optional. (I removed that
from my repertoire only because I'm never quite certain where those
thumbs have been)
It's Phase II now, and time to Dust My Broom and
start putting things back in place. I'm gonna start here--the apartment
can wait.
First of all, thanks to Paul Clarke over at The
Cocktail Chronicles for the tip of the hat. A lot of eyes were
driven over here by that post (most of them at lunchtime, it seems) and
I owe many of them an apology-- to all the readers using IE or Safari I
had an errant "Object tag" (whatever that is) and it screwed up my page
something fierce. Everything is fixed and stable now--until the next
time I break it.
Other reader inquiries:
Regarding an RSS feed
(whatever that is): I don't have an automatic subscription widgety thing
(yet) but you can manually subscribe by putting http://TheThistinHowl.com/rss.xml
somewhere in your aggregator. I'm not sure what that means, exactly, but
it sounds like an insult you might hear in a bar near Redmond.
The
Gibberish: No, I'm not trying to sound "cool" or "stoned" or
anything like that. The text that I've used as subheadings etc are
quotes from Allen Ginsberg's famous poem, HOWL. It's
probably fair to call it gibberish but it's also a personell roster and
memoir of the nascent Beats. A lot of it can be
impenetrable and there are more than a few "decoded" annotated versions
on line. Here's an un-decoded version of Ginsburg's
Howl .
Thirstin Howl the III: Yes, there is a Puerto
Rican rapper in Brooklyn with this name. I discovered him and the gang
from Skilligan's Island when I tried to register my blog with his
handle. I quickly adjusted by adding "The" to my blog's name. I thought
it was simply a URL fix, but it made a subtle yet tremendous shift in
the way I approached my blog. Initially Thirstin Howl would have been a
boozy character driven blog, but with the name change, it became more
about the Howl,
and
Thurston, the man, disappeared completely. Hence the gibberish.
Jim Backus still appears on my cards, sipping something Tiki in his
Howell Hut. It's too precious not to use.
The Thirsty Howl,
now that I think of it, would have worked just fine too. 
It's the 4th of
July
and besides the National Commemoration that we all know about,
there's another fellow that we should hoist a drink to tonight.
Hiram
Walker
"was born in Douglas, Massachusetts, forty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was signed; born without the handicap of any special advantages. We pay this tribute to his memory not so much becasue he was a world-famous figure at eighty-three but because he was a failure at forty-one. For, like a true American, he never accepted defeat"
He gets the full wikipedia treatment here: Hiram Walker