Monthly Archive for October, 2005

La Fee Verte

Damn Matt to hell. He sent me this link and any adverse consequence is entirely his to bear…

I have long been a sucker for the mystique built up around absinthe. Anything that might have contributed to Van Gogh lopping of his ear can’t be all bad, right? Right? Well, you know what I’m getting at. Plus, I like anise/liquorice flavors, so I bet I’d dig it.

So then comes this: The Mystery of the Green Menace

So Breaux decided to make some himself. He found a French-language history book with “pre-ban protocols,” a vague description of how absinthe was made back before it was outlawed. Armed with the protocols, he prepared a batch in the lab. The result? “Not very good,” he concedes. “I couldn’t imagine that being the most popular liqueur in France.”

He got his chance to taste the real thing in 1996, when a friend spotted a bottle marked “old French liquor” at an estate sale. They were asking $300, and Breaux, seeing it was a vintage Spanish Pernod Tarragona absinthe, immediately wrote a check. When he got it to his lab, he plunged a syringe through the cork, extracted one precious sip, and downed it. “It had a honeyed texture, distinct herbal and floral notes, and a gentle roundness uncharacteristic of such a strong liquor,” he says. “Those protocols were crap.”

So, Ted Breaux used his gas chromatography-mass spectrometer to analyze some old, pre-ban absinthe and has figured how to distill something approaching the real thing. (Breaux calls the stuff you can get in the Czech Republic, etc. these days “mouthwash and vodka in a bottle, with some aromatherapy oil.”)

“It’s like an herbal speedball,” he says. “Some of the compounds are excitatory, some are sedative. That’s the real reason artists liked it. Drink two or three glasses and you can feel the effects of the alcohol, but your mind stays clear - you can still work.”

Breaux has hooked up with a distiller in France and you can order his goods onlineshipped via courier — for around $150 a bottle. Yikes. I don’t even spend that kind of scratch on Scotch, and I know I like Scotch.

But I am sorely tempted…

Damn you, Matt.

CL350 Rebuild Write-Up

No, not ours… We’re far too busy wrenching and consuming beers (”Thirsty work, that motorcycle.”) to keep a running diary of the things we’ve done.

But luckily someone in Minnesota managed to do just that when he rebuilt a 1972 Honda CL350 K4 (that’s one year newer than ours).

It’s a fun read. I love that they named theirs “Pup-Pup” — It’s a fitting name.

No way! A cool Hummer?

Looks like GM may pull off something I never considered possible: A Hummer I actually think is cool looking.

Cosmetics aside, though, it’s still a Hummer, and therefore still stupid.

Rosa

After yesterday’s topic, I would be remiss if I didn’t say goodbye to Rosa Parks.

Aryan Olsens?

As many of you must know by now, one of my personal watch items is racism and hate groups/crimes - particularly as manifested in the white power movement and its various incarnations. Given that, you can probably guess how I reacted when I saw Matt’s link to this article:

Young Singers Spread Racist Hate

Known as “Prussian Blue” — a nod to their German heritage and bright blue eyes — the girls from Bakersfield, Calif., have been performing songs about white nationalism before all-white crowds since they were nine.

“We’re proud of being white, we want to keep being white,” said Lynx. “We want our people to stay white … we don’t want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race.”

Holy shit! Daddy brands his cattle with swastikas, y’all! And of course, they are free to say whatever they want here in the USofA… but WOW!

I see it like this: I consider it animal abuse to train a dog to be aggressive — eventually that dog is going to cause severe damage to something or someone and have to be destroyed. By training the dog to attack, you are basically killing the dog (nevermind whatever gets mauled by it). On the same side of the same coin, I also consider it dangerous psychological abuse to raise children to hate other people based on superficial judgments. That applies to everyone — any religious zealots, any nationalist xenophobes, etc. — not just some swastika swinging cowboy in the California wastelands breeding Aryan pop stars who seem just a likely to end up in a trailer strung out on meth in ten years as to do anything worthwhile with their lives. (So why do I say that? I say it because hate thrives in isolation — these girls’ parents already want to move to an “all-white community in the Pacific Northwest” because Bakersfield, CA isn’t white enough. So, yeah, it’s easy for me to imagine these girls getting home schooled in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere until they get married off to a couple of prison tattooed crankheads. Am I prejudging them the same way they prejudge people of color? Do they deserve it? Do my preconceived notions have any more factual basis than theirs? Is it right to hate hate?)

Hate ruins people, and there’s no excuse for teaching it. I don’t care how precious you hold the First Amendment.

Co-Worker Cam II


Holzmann
Originally uploaded by Jake Sutton.