Gaellery’s Hotel room whisky and gin dispenser. Push in the drawer, pull out, and find a tiny bottle of booze. Just like those movies you claim you didn’t watch, it’s automatically charged to your bill.

John McCain’s election team apparently told staff at The Phoenix Biltmore to have extra whisky on hand for their election party tonight. They’re not just planning to drown their sorrows: Republicans and Republican-leaning independents drink more whisky than the national average.

Sweet photo by Bearfaced, though I almost used this picture of barrels (or this one).

This thread says you can get booze and ice cream in the same joint! Places to know in NYC: Otto, The Chocolate Room (beer & wine only?), ChikaLicious, Clinton Street Baking Company, BLT Burger, Homer’s, and Liquor & Ice Cream.

New Hampshire’s deputy chief of liquor enforcement caught drunk driving.

ironic, irony, booze, liquor

tree, holidays, liquor, nips, happy holidays

Unattributable:

“Poetic justice is a lie. It’s no more real than military inteligence. The entire motivation for poetry is the unjust pain of life.”

Separately, what’s the appropriate LC classification for Scotch? My first thought was around PR600, but what do I know. Should it go elsewhere? What about other spirits?

poetry, justice, poetic justice, scotch, lc classification, liquor

I convinced Sandee to join me at Atomic Liquors on Fremont Street, just beyond the Western Hotel Casino in what the Las Vegas Sun calls the “gritty underbelly of Las Vegas.”

Owner Joe Sobchick and his wife Stella started business in 1945 with a cafe called Virginia’s. They converted it into a bar in 1953, and changed the name to recognize their proximity to the nuclear tests just 60 miles away.

Now nearly 90, Joe believes he’s been in business longer than any other single bar owner in town, and it’s been a good run. You’ll see his sign in TV, magazines, and movies, most famously perhaps in Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) with Robert De Niro and Sharon Stone.

The decline of the neighborhood challenged the Sobchiks, but they fought back. And amazingly — for a city that is constantly reinventing itself — the community seems to have stood behind them.

Roderick sent me a link to this Reason article on Absinthe that claims:

the U.S. Food and Drug Administration considers true absinthe “adulterated” because of the wormwood. Production, sale, and importation are banned, but mere possession is not, and customs agents typically ignore a bottle or two in your suitcase. It’s a legal situation that seems designed to keep absinthe cool.“

The Wikipedia article on absinthe pretty much confirms that point, so who’s going to test it?

(notes:)

1. image from the Virtual Absinthe Museum
2. Yes, I asked Roderick ”please tell me you don’t read Reason (the PR arm of the Libertarians, which is the PR arm of the Republicans to pull in “younger, hipper” voters) regularly.“ He had an entirely plausible answer for the negative.

absinth, absinthe, advertising poster, alcohol, drink, food and drug administration, green fairy, legal situation, libertarians, liquor, little green fairy, spirit, wormwood

Alan Moorhead, in his 1952 Rum Jungle — a sort of casual ethnography or serious travelogue — explains the uses and attitudes towards alcohol in his native Australia:

[...] I took it for granted that for all social occasions, at any time of the day or night, beer was the drink. You did not take it with your meals, but before or afterwards and in considerable quantities. Beer was the solace of life and the white man’s true vision of bliss. You drank it, either at home in pint bottles, or standing up in a bar (from which all women were excluded) in thick glass pots. And since beer exercised so potent a spell and was so delectable in every way, it was only natural that all public houses should close at six in the evening and that the sale of all alcoholic liquor be prevented by law until nine o’clock the following morning. On Sunday the pubs were closed altogether. Had men been able to drink at leisure at any time of the day or night there was no saying what they would do; that was the underlying fear.

I learned of the book from a mention in Bill Bryson’s In A Sunburned Country. It wasn’t as exciting a read as the title might suggest — the name comes from a region of northwest Australia where uranium had then recently been discovered and was being mined. Moorehead offers a rather unbelievable story for the cause of name, so I’ll pass on repeating it here.

What I will note is his description of the US Army’s activities in the northern territories during World War II.

The Americans are remembered now for their extraordinary celerity. They went up into the Atherton Tablelands — the massif that rises from the coast behind Cairns — and built camps almost overnight. When they had no bitumen with which to make airfields they tool barrels of molasses from the sugar-cane factories and made runways out of that. With DDT they banished the mosquitoes (which have since returned), and they brought more life to Cairns and Townsville than the local people had seen in many a long day.

If nothing else, Moorehead’s work reveals how, in 1952, the risks of uranium and DDT were unknown and, instead, they represented progress and wealth.

tags: alan moorehead, alcohol, alcoholic liquor, australia, beer, bill bryson, liquor, native australian, night beer, northwest australia, pint bottles, public houses, rum jungle, social occasions, sunburned country, unbelievable story

I just love tests (previously: psychotic, leadership style in movies and famous people in history, and eccentric or autistic), so I was quick to try myself at this one when Al emailed me. It’s about alcohol, and like most tests, it’s not about getting the answer right, but giving the answer that the test writer wants. So it’s flawed, but it’s a bit of fun. Here are my results:

Score: Bacardi 151
Congratulations! You’re 137 proof, with specific scores in beer (40), wine (116), and liquor (147).

All right. No more messing around. Your knowledge of alcohol is so high that you have drinking and getting plastered down to a science. Sure, you could get wasted drinking beer, but who needs all those trips to the bathroom? You head straight for the bar and pick up that which is most efficient.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 69% on proof
You scored higher than 67% on beer index
You scored higher than 94% on wine index
You scored higher than 99% on liquor index

Try your own mind at the Alcohol Knowledge Test.

tags: alcohol, alcohol iq, bacardi 151, bar skills, beer, knowledge, liquor, personality test, personality tests, test, tests, wine