Your Neighborhood Librarian

Your Neighborhood Librarian Sorts Your Socks

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Thu, 02 May 2013 03:17:00 +0000

What I know about housework and what I know about poetry are roughly the same. You mop up tiny shards of glass with a piece of bread. There you go. That's what I know about poetry and what I know about housework in the same sentence. So when I get to talking about either or both subjects, it's a lot like The Drunk History of Stuff Women Do When They're Not Working For a Living or Having Fun.

And that's what I did today on the way to work...

Your Neighborhood Librarian Couldn't Clean the Poetry Aisle Even if Edna St. Vincent Millay Were Dancing Naked In It With A Feather Duster Sticking Out Her Butt

There are all these metaphors about housework. People have done 'em a whole lot better than I ever could. Like I think Marilynne Robinson, she wrote a book called Housekeeping. I... didn't read it, so I don't know if it's about... sweeping. [NB: Not really.] Or, uh, what. But people are always burbling about how creating an ordered house, that's like an ordered mind, I think Sylvia Plath said that. [NB: She did not.] Didn't work out for her though.

You always think of these poems - and I KNOW how people write poems about housework. I know how people write a poem about ironing.

It's because they're standing there, at the fucking ironing board, and they're ironing, and they're bored out of their minds because we are not the generation that remembers that ironing is what Days of Our Lives is for, you're supposed to stand at the ironing board and watch Cord bore holes into Monica's skull with his gaze, while across town Monica's husband is selecting a piece of jewelry for her and being flirted with by the saleswoman at the jewelry shop, who is Cord's illegitimate daughter.

So people ironing now, they don't have Cord and Monica and Monica's hairspray to stare at, so they start stringing together nonsense words and then that starts to make them feel a little psychotic, so they have to revert to the discipline of wordsmithing. Phrasing. Putting thoughts together and feeling around for le mot juste. Making stuff work.

There's a poet driving the car next to me right now! Hi, Ginny! She doesn't see me. Ginny's the kind of person who totally - well, I don't know if she irons, nobody irons - but like if she were folding laundry, she would be putting together felicitous words and phrases in her head. I don't like most poetry, but I like Ginny's poetry.

So I was doing a bunch of housework yesterday, and was I writing poetry in my head? No. No. But I can see - like I said - I can see... where... you might... I can see where you might! I can see where you might.

I could see, like, Emily Dickinson polishing the silver and thinking about tarnish, and the stains of sin upon your soul, or whatever... Emily Dickinson might have thought about, like how bored she was, and how come she didn't have any options in life, other than to sit there and look at stuff. And polish silver, like, for fun, right? Emily Dickinson didn't have to polish her own silver, I'm sure she did it because she was bored out of her tree! [NB: Ha! Emily Dickinson totally had to polish silver!]

She wasn't solving mysteries anyway, that's for sure. There's a new YA novel out with teenage Emily Dickinson solving a mystery and there's a handsome guy who lived down the road... ha ha nooooot for Emily Dickinson, man! No way. She had no handsome strangers in her life, and she didn't solve any mysteries... I don't know what she did.

I don't even know if she had silver.

No, for me, the poetry of housework is after it's done. Like yesterday, among other things that I did (and we'll get to those), I folded a load of towels. An entire laundry load of towels. It takes us kind of a long time to need to wash towels, because I kind of have a lot of towels, I don't know, we own a dozen towels I guess? Plus there are the towels for my hair, that's a thing, that's a whole different thing, they have to be the right size. Regular hand towels are just a little bit too small, because they have to wrap all the way around my head and then twist up - this is not that important, is it. But the towels that Bob steals from the hotel gyms when he travels, they're perfect. Not as big as a bath towel, a little longer than a hand towel, they're for slinging around your shoulders and mopping up your gross damn sweat.

So nice. But once he steals them and brings them home, and they're washed, I don't know, seven or eight times - with bleach... lye, oxi fresh, oxy contin - they're just the right size to wrap my hair up in so it'll dry just at least a little bit before I leave the house. I mean, I'm not going to blow dry it, I've got two feet of hair! Plus it's getting all damagey from me dying it pink for seven years. Or maybe that's just me getting old.

Anyway, I have all these towels. I washed them. Yesterday, while I was waiting for the auto glass guy to come and repair the broken passenger window in the minivan - thanks to whoever thought that they were going to get rich by breaking a window in our minivan and stealing a three year old laptop - Bob's laptop, and Bob uses laptops like he uses running shoes, this thing looked like he'd been using it to pry cement tiles off the side of a building. Bob once backed over a laptop with the car and then continued to use it. "Oh, if I just hook it up to a different monitor, it still works!"

The only ok thing about getting the window busted out of your car is Safelite. Goodness gracious, you are definitely living in the Developed World when you have to call Safelite. You get on the website, they ask you like three questions, they say, "Would you like us to come to your house?" and you're like, "Uhhh, sure!" They say, "Oh hey when's the last time you replaced your wiper blades, we can bring those and install them while we're there, you wanna?" and you go, "Well, OKAY! Can you, like, wax my legs too while you're here?"

So while I was waiting for the Safelite guy to come wait on me hand and foot, I folded a load of towels. You want to talk about hypnotic work, oh baby. It's not like you're folding kids' pants, or long-sleeved t-shirts. You don't have a lot of decisions - you have one decision, you decide halves-then quarters-then thirds, or thirds-then halves-then quarters, or halves-quarters-eighths, and you decide it once and then you're a machine. A gentle, quiet machine, same motions over and over, flattening, matching corners, and you end up with all these same-sized oblong packages, clean and calm and even. "Good King Wenceslas looked out..." (I'm singing here) Yeah it's just like snowfall, folded towels.

You know? How many towels have you folded in your life?

So the poetry of having folded a load of towels is that today I get out of the shower and open the closet in the bathroom, and there's this beautiful wall of folded terrycloth bricks. Maybe that's why I'm a librarian. Lining things up, stacking things, and they're all basically the same size, it's satisfying to me. Both the action and the result satisfy me.

That was a verrry long pause. You don't transcribe the pauses, but that was a verrrry long pause.

I think my mind was lovingly caressing stacks of towels.

Other housework that I did yesterday had its own poetry. I did other laundry, and I sorted the rag basket - when was it that I thought baby socks would be good rags? They're not, I got rid of them yesterday.

But this other chore - the sump pump backed up last week, and I'm telling you before you read any further, it was not a sewage sump pump backup. This is not a foul tragedy. No, it was Ezra's bathwater, and if you want anybody's bathwater to seep up onto the basement floor, you want Ezra's. He does not yet have appreciable B.O., he knows how to wipe himself, and the weather is still cool enough for him to be wearing long pants, so he's not even really dirty.

Ezra's bathwater is like sweetly-scented elf bathwater. Bailing out the sump pump wasn't that horrendous. And we have carpet tiles in the basement, we just lifted the wet ones up and laid 'em on the deck stairs. Good and done.

Except for. The part where you have to put the carpet tiles back together after they are dry. JESUS CHRIST. They're not square carpet tiles, we didn't get those paper-thin wool ones from FLOR, no, we got nice thick squishy artificial-fiber ones! They have that slightly sparkly acrylic sheen to them, just like the wall-to-wall in your cousin's place in the suburbs. Not my cousins. My cousins have classy rugs. YOUR cousins.

Yeah, these tiles have pads, and pile, and they're wavy along one edge so that they lock together somewhat. Which, again, fine. EXCEPT.

The first time I put 'em down, and I probably wrote about that, because... Jeeeezus Christ. I spent like three days on my knees on the basement floor, and NOT in the fun way.

Putting them back down is not quite as big a job, but you kind of want to find out exactly where each one was, because the edge pieces are cut to fit, and the middle pieces, even though they're all the same size, through use and wear they now are less than identical.

OR... you can choose to distribute them differently, to even out the wear pattern, and ALL THIS because when I am on my knees on the basement floor it is either think about wear patterns in the fucking carpet tile, or try to puzzle out the exact moment when I gave a shit about whether the basement carpet looks hodgepodgey, and that is not a fruitful road. That is not a road paved with gummy bears.

It's like doing a jigsaw puzzle with three-foot-square puzzle pieces that are more or less the same size, shape, and color, and linty to boot. So. A puzzle that you do on your knees and end up covered in cat hair and synthetic fibers afterward.

The poetry that went through my mind while I was doing that was... it was not what you might think. It was not this endless stream of swears, it was not like when the insurance person hangs up on you. No, I get strings of lyrics that repeat, on my knees on the floor. I get Circle Game, and Cinderella Man, and then I get "you spin me right round baby right round like a record baby right round round round," which will... oh that keeps going in your head long enough, you will think "Oh no! This is what Jeffrey Dahmer heard in his head! This is what... Squeaky Fromme heard in her head when she was like, 'oh, that Chuck Manson, he's so handsome, I think I need to go do whatever he says now.'"

Squeaky Fromme, now that's a phrase you could use in a poem. I wonder if she's still alive. I think I read in the New York Times Magazine that she's - no, that was a different woman. A different teenage terrorist who turned into a reverend or something in prison. A force for good. That's what happened to me, you know. I was a teenage - well. I wasn't an out-and-out terrorist. In my heart I was, in my heart I was a cultural terrorist. And then I grew up and now I, I minister to others.

That's exactly what I'm doing here. I'm showing you the path, giving you guidance. Telling you to go ahead and fold the goddamn towels, you'll feel good about it later, no matter what you think.

That's me, Your Neighborhood Librarian, over and out.

Your Neighborhood Librarian Is Done With Your Bullshit

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 16:29:00 +0000

Oh hey Seth I got a song for you too: "I saw your ass!
Sticking out the neck of your tux the other night."

So here it is, the Tuesday after the 2013 Academy Awards, and I am somehow not getting over my irritation with the sexist, anti-Semitic, selfish boys' room tone of that show. Oh, am I just a humorless bitch and I should get over it? Please see my previous posts on - oh just about anything - and decide for yourself if I have a sense of humor or not.

In fact, if anything, I am more pissed the more time goes by. That guy said of Salma Hayek, a fine actress with great comic timing who by the way could buy and sell Seth MacFarlane over breakfast with the hubs, "we have no idea what she's saying but we don't care because she's so attractive."

Oh my god. Fuck that guy. Not everybody, actually, is just here to give you wood. And you know, I find myself saying this - well, not a lot. But sometimes. So here you go.

Your Neighborhood Librarian Says Fuck That Guy

So next, my excellent husband has left the New York Times magazine open on the kitchen counter because he knows I'll be interested in a little article Pagan Kennedy wrote about the guy who invented the Pantone color system. Not to worry - Lawrence Herbert seems like he was a lovely, interesting fellow with a really interesting life, matching color swatches to blood samples, wine, goldfish, and runway fashion. But when his daughter was asked about the most unusual use of Pantone, she had this to share: "Calvin Klein kept a Pantone chip in the kitchen to signal to his chef what color he wanted his coffee to be."

Yes of course. If it's not exactly Pantone 462C, how could one even attempt to drink it? Fuck that guy.

Everything James Wood says is true. Fuck Paul Auster.

Do not even ask me
what that title means.
Whatever, drug boy.

We noticed a picture book about Lance Armstrong last night in the children's section, and I just had to laugh. You got to figure, if there is one person in the world who could be heaving a sigh of relief that Oscar Pistorius shot his girlfriend, it's Lance Armstrong.

I wouldn't put it past the guy either. The latest news from the Armstrong Legal Battalion is that they're going to say that there's no case for fraud, because it must have been obvious to the U.S. Government (specifically the US Postal Service, in my opinion not the sharpest privatized sloughed-off government nodule in the shed - did you hear they're going to stop delivering mail on Saturdays because it's too expensive? Dudes, you deliver mail, that's what you do. Maybe stop stocking miniature teddy bears in the post office and hiring elder gods in disguise to staff your service desks and you might save a little $$ and be able to deliver the damn mail!) that he and others on the team were using performance enhancing drugs, even though he absolutely insisted for ten years - and intimidated other people into likewise insisting - that he was not.

Right now Lance Armstrong is sitting at lunch with his lawyers and his publicist and anyone else who will still be seen in public with him, like shrugging and saying, "Hey man, at least Sheryl Crow is still above ground and kicking, am I right?? How bad can I be? Nooooot that bad!"

Oh yeah. Fuck that guy.

YA author Matt de la Peña. I just couldn't bear
using a picture of Arizona AG Tom Horne.
Have you seen that guy? He looks a cross
between a bulldog and a fish.

Tom Horne. Oh my god FUCK this guy. Tom Horne was the narrow-minded reactionary tool who cancelled Mexican-American studies in Arizona schools. He was the state school superintendent at the time, and some of the districts that he governed were more than 60% Latino.

Horne threatened to withdraw 10% of its budget, nearly $15 million, if the Tucson Unified School District didn't eliminate ethnic-studies classes. "It's just like the old South," he said, clearly confused about the nature of actual prejudice. Among the books removed from classrooms were Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire and Mexican WhiteBoy by Matt de la Peña. Pedagogy of the Oppressed is by a Brazilian Marxist and is a great discussion-starter, but I can see why a person might regard it with alarm. Mexican Whiteboy, on the other hand, is about a half-Mexican pitching prodigy who has trouble with his control. Ooo, scary.

Mr. Horne has recently been in the news again. On a drive in a borrowed car with a lady friend (with whom he was having an affair), he backed into another car and then drove off without leaving a note. As you do. (You don't!) So then he asks the court to dismiss the case, because if it was anyone else - say, someone who wasn't being tailed by the FBI - nobody would even have noticed! Tool.

But I know what you thought I was going to scathe this guy for - you heard about Tom Horne when he made a written proposal that school principals take up arms. Firearms. Guns.

The proposal is that any school that wishes to do so, may designate the Principal or another designee to receive training in the use of firearms and how to handle emergencies such as that which occurred in Newtown. The training would be provided by personnel of the Attorney General’s Office, and of the cooperating Sheriff’s Offices. The training would be free to the schools. The designated individual (no more than one per school) would then be authorized to keep a firearm locked in a secure place, and would have adequate communication to be alerted to an emergency in any part of the school.

Upon receiving the alert, our armed principal would then presumably armor up, ride out on his or her motorcycle - horse if one is available - and GUN DOWN the deranged, probably ludicrously heavily-armed, broken individual who has decided to end his life in the most heartbreakingly vicious bid for attention we are ever unfortunate enough to witness.

Because that'll work. I wonder if Mr. Horne has ever noticed that the law enforcement community's preferred way to "handle emergencies such as that which happened in Newtown" is to send an entire fucking SWAT team? NOT a liberal arts major armed with a handgun, a firm grasp of multiple learning modalities, and an authoritative demeanor.

Hey but the AG would provide the firearms training free of charge! Bargain!

Say it with me, parents. Fellow humans. FUCK. THAT. GUY.

Librarian out.

Your Neighborhood Librarian Avoids the Clap

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 19:19:00 +0000

Gracious, looks like I never posted this, despite having written it in about March. It's about a surprising thing:

So, here's a surprising thing. Today's adventure - in our ongoing series of Your Neighborhood Librarian Gets Shit Done - involves something that I was putting off for a reallly long time, and that's buying jeans. My New Year's Resolution was... oh wait, the surprising thing. I don't want to leave anyone in suspense. That shit kills, you know. Nobody needs excess suspense.

Your Neighborhood Librarian Buys Jeans at the Mall

Times when you wish Purell made lube.

The surprising thing I'm talking about, the thing that will shock and alarm you is - I have just spent basically the whole day at the MAAALLLL, and I am in really a ridiculously good mood. Just chew on that for a second.

THE MALL. The place where crowds and perfume samples and overpriced throw pillows and the sinister alleyways of the second floor - I mean, you could get a raging case of genital warts even just from lingering outside Abercrombie and Fitch long enough to tie your shoe. NEVER touch the floor, or god help you the benches, outside of Abercrombie and Fitch.

But I. Prevailed.

Let's backtrack. Let me give you the backstory, the exposition for how I got to the MAALLL in the first place.

My New Year's Resolution was to stop wearing unflattering pants. And that's maybe a little shallow. I know. My husband's resolution, by the way, was to stop getting so defensive when I criticized him for the way that he does things around the house. And it took me a minute to parse that, and then I was like, "Oh." And I made this face:

Now, he sprung this on me January 2, the day after our neighborhood's New Years Day Pig Roast, during which we are all on our feet for about 12 hours cooking a pig and cutting up a pig and socializing and encouraging people to eat more and generally bounding around with big grins on our faces. It's SO GREAT.

But on January 2, I am deeply, deeply done. Fried like a pig's ear. A little tired. So he says to me on January 2, he says,

"My New Year's resolution is not to get so defensive when you criticize the way that I unload the dishwasher, or like... fold t-shirts. For example."
And I, being tired and dense, said that my resolution was to stop wearing unflattering pants. And he just looked at me.
So then, to clarify, he said, "I think the reason I get so defensive is that sometimes I come home from a few days on the road, or even just home from work, and you kind of hand off to me a little bit."
And I was like, "Because it may seem like I have a lot of pants, but almost all of them are very frustrating."
So he further clarifies: "So when you tell me that I'm loading the dishwasher wrong, I get a little defensive."
And I say, "Huh." And I think about it for a second, as much as I am capable, which isn't much, see above RE: FRIED LIKE A PIG'S EAR, and I consider making some kind of meeting-halfway gesture, but then I realize that I am not at the moment savvy enough to not get myself in big trouble with a resolution that I will not be able to uphold, and besides I am dimly aware that he has just constructed the personal goal equivalent of the Back-Door Brag... call it the Right Back Atcha Resolution... so I say, "Weeelll, I'm going to stick with the pants thing."

But I do try not to criticize him, really. When I come across a basket of folded laundry - I mean, have you ever seen... you know, some primates do this kind of wadding behavior when they're making their nests of leaves for the night? Gorillas. Gorillas do that, right? So - and it's not fair of me to expect him to know how to fold a t-shirt perfectly, I worked retail, I know how to fold a t-shirt - I just re-do the basket. It takes me 10 minutes to fold a stack of t-shirts and I can do it without thinking, in a kind of fugue state.

Even if there were loose diamonds in those pockets,
I would not put my hand in there.

Anyone who's ever worked retail - and that's a lot of us - wouldn't wish retail on anyone. Although, you know, some people never have. Some people earned extra money during college by couriering diamonds back and forth between the diamond merchants on West 47th in NYC. SOME people never learned to fold a shirt because they spent their shirt-folding years walking around New York City with like ten thousand dollars worth of diamonds folded up in a little piece of paper in their jeans pocket, because the diamond guys prefer their couriers to be low-key.

That's right: my husband was like Matt Damon in Oceans Twelve during his early twenties, while I was more like... Parker Posey in anything. "I walked the streets of the greatest city in America with a fortune in my pocket" beats the hell out of "I made minimum wage folding sweaters and measuring the inseam of wizened Ukrainian-American senior citizens so that I could sell them another pair of Sansabelt slacks at Higbee's in the Severance Mall in Cleveland." Everything in Cleveland has a name like "Severance Mall." My sister-in-law lives in Chagrin Falls. It's like a town name in a John Irving novel.

One of my co-workers at Higbee's. Right.

My part of the men's department was sandwiched between the suit guys, who worked on commission and were therefore equal parts bitchy and desperate, and the cologne counter. This was during the Mid-Eighties Men's Cologne Renaissance - and you remember what product lit that flame, don't you? Hmm? It was Calvin Klein Obsession. Oh god. Sigma Chi at my school was about 75% gay in those years (naturally, I was a Little Sister), and you couldn't get within thirty feet of that house without catching an eye-watering whiff of Obsession for Men. Girls took to wearing it too. At certain parties, its vaguely foot-y, piercing odor overpowered even the keg beer and garbage-can Everclear punch. And I went to a geek school! Think what it was like at Penn State!

Back at work, I had to endure the Obsession for Men ADS. Those ads! They played on a loop on a TV above the cologne counter, and it was all those disjointed phrases that were supposed to be sexy and mysterious and I actually could still recite them all verbatim and that is a TERRIBLE realization.

"Oh, the smell of it." That sold cologne? What a mess. And who is that? Stella Tennant?

So if you need to send some loose diamonds across town in an inconspicuous manner, ask Bob. You want your shirts folded into weirdly perfect squares, get me. Or don't. Fold your own damn shirts.

I've lost track again. Let's recap: his New Year's resolution was to not get so defensive when I am hypercritical of the way that he does the lion's share of the housework. Have I got that right? I think I've got that right. My New Year's resolution: No More Unflattering Pants.

I went through all my pants and tried em all on and the ones that weren't good, I pitched. Took them to Goodwill. So that left me with three pairs of pants that fit. That's not including leggings, or shorts, or pants to paint in, and of course I actually have a drawer full of pants-shaped apparel, like to the male eye, the male might say, "But what are all these?" but in fact there are only three. Just take my word for it, okay?

I've been putting it off. Of course I've been putting it off! Who likes buying pants? It's the long dark night of the soul! It's the fluorescent-lit cramped overheated afternoon of the soul, that's what it is. I'd say that again, but I've forgotten it already.

Today was the day though. I was sitting in the coffee shop, knitting - badly - real badly, and a lady walked in and she still had the size sticker down the side of her jeans. And I pointed out the sticker and she peeled it off and she said, "Oh I love these new jeans! Did you know they had Levis at Penney's?"

And I thought to myself, "Huh. Levis." Levis. I had not been looking forward to going to Nordstrom and trying on Habitual and 7 for all Mankind, and Acne, and all these hip-ass two-hundred-dollar jeans that were just going to gap at the back and bind at the knee... I don't know why they don't fit me. I don't. I have had two pair of Luckys that fit like a dream, and then every time I go back there I am fooled! Fooled into buying a pair of Luckys that a week later are sagging off the butt or how did I not notice that they're so short in the dressing room.

But Levis. I wore Levis as a kid and all through college and as an adult until designer jeans came back in the late 90's and my cousin The Talented Cousin Rachel took me to the jeans bar at Diesel and said, "You're not leaving until you have a pair of cool jeans." But maybe now I'm done with cool jeans. I am in my mid-forties and I don't exercise so maybe I am done with cool jeans and I don't want to think about that too much so I am just going to go to the Levis store at the mall.

This yoga pose is called... no I'm sorry. Even I can't go there.

And I'm kind of geared up for trying on clothes. I have my stretchy pants on, which, don't tell anybody I may have slept in, and then rolled out of bed to take the kids to school and put on a shirt. Which possibly I may also have slept in. But I am wearing a bra.

Wow we are verging into too much information here. But it is a fact: you do NOT want to find yourself in a fitting room with no bra on, not after two kids you don't. And on top of this cunning ensemble I have my Vulcan Traditional Greeting hoody and a ball cap - I look like a slob but maybe I can pass for one of those moms with the sinewy arms and sinewy faces who have just come from like Mega Body Ab Class Yoga or whatever, there are sure to be some of those at the mall at 10:30am. Picking up a little something at Abercrombie & Fitch.

That ball cap is kind of essential. I had a boyfriend once who said of my messy morning hair, "You know when your hair is like that, when it's in a braid and the top is all messy..." and I'm thinking the end of this sentence will involve words like "untamed" and "sexy" and "back to bed" but instead he says, "...you look... mad. And I don't mean angry mad - although you're beginning to look like that now - I mean like Mrs. Rochester mad. Madwoman in the attic mad. Lady who spent 25 minutes talking to a bench in the library last week mad."

Shut up about my hair, jackass.

ERGO BALL CAP. One that my husband brought me back from a business trip. He works in Kansas, so it's the Wichita State... Wizards. Wombats. Winklevosses. Somethings.

And of course, I'm wearing my long striped red and pink scarf because at this point mama don't go down to the basement for a can of beans without wrapping a scarf around this stringy, saggy, tendony neck.

I park outside of Nordstroms and I walk straight through. I don't need the shame spiral that would accompany looking terrible in two hundred dollar jeans. I walk past a bunch of other places. I have discipline.

But for some reason, I find myself drawn into Benetton. 70% off signs in the window. And a jumper on a mannequin. I've been wearing a lot of jumpers this winter. They're kind of unstructured through the middle, right where I am kind of unstructured. So I thought I'd look at the jumpers at Benetton.

Wow. Benetton has changed, y'all. Forget the crayon-colored fine knitwear, now it's all slightly cheap woven wool. There was a sweater labeled "cashmere" that turned out to be THREE PERCENT cashmere. The carpet in my bedroom has a higher cashmere content than that. My new cat has a higher cashmere content than that, just from having a common ancestor with a goat.

But I picked a pair of jeans off a rack, you know, I'm staying On Mission, and they had this pair of like silver dusted jeans and because I sometimes find it necessary to dress like a teenage David Bowie, I liked the look of the silver dusted jeans. They were size... 38. What is a 38, in jeans? Not waist size, not at Benetton - it's more like a European shoe size. But I figured 38 was a pretty big number so I'd try them on.

And it was in the miniscule Benetton fitting room that I discovered that, first of all, 38 is apparently some kind of Italian toddler size. I should disclose - and this is not a brag, because there is nothing pretty about skinny legs - I have skinny legs. Old lady legs, getting to be. And I could not get one leg of those jeans up past my knee.

Second, I noticed that the shirt that I may or may not have slept in was not only pretty significantly torn on the side seam, but also... inside out. No wonder the nice man at Benetton never tried to wait on me. Although that man was way too old to be working retail, leading me to seriously wonder whether Benetton is some kind of money laundering front. You never see anyone in there...

We nearly aborted right there. That first gimlet-eyed squint at yourself in the fitting room mirror is so often the last. But I soldiered on. Went to the Levis store. Tried on fifty or sixty pairs of jeans and corduroys. Have I mentioned that working retail blows? That poor young lady. And I was extra unhelpful, having no idea what size I might wear, and also wanting to try mens' jeans.

I was fed a line of BS about the jeans I actually did buy, from a boy who was younger than the boots I was wearing. He explained that they were made of "salvage denim." Right. Levis found a shipment of denim that had been lost in a storm and lain perfectly preserved at the bottom of Lake Superior until divers brought it up, sent it to China, and made an enormous run of jeans out of it. The word you're looking for is "selvage," son. It refers to the finished edge of the fabric at the outseam.

Retail, baby. How can you call those wasted years when I came away with knowledge like that?

So this is Your Neighborhood Librarian. Not going naked to work. Let's all not. 'Til next time...

Your Neighborhood Librarian Can Hear a Bell Ring

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 02:21:00 +0000

I don't have cable, and I mostly don't miss it. I would like to watch the E! Oscars pregame show, yes granted, and I would probably waste a lot of time watching marathons on SyFy if I had it, but mostly I am ok with my collection of James Bond / Veronica Mars DVDs and Sports Night on Netflix.

Last Sunday night, however, was another matter ENTIRELY. That night, the hotly anticipated Lifetime original movie Liz and Dick was to air. I had been hearing about it for MONTHS. The gossips had news from the set that Lindsay Lohan could barely function. The trailer was so snipped-up you just knew they never got an entire coherent line out of her. And you know how Google sometimes tells it like it is? Like how if you're researching the history of lawn-ornament Blessed Virgin Mary statues and you google "antique yard Madonna" and Google's top result is a review excoriating Madonna's 2012 Super Bowl halftime performance I AM NOT LYING TRY IT YOURSELF - oops, there's another sentence that got away from me...

I mean... right? WRONG.

Umm anyway. You google "Liz & Dick parody" and it's all reviews of the actual movie. Plus this montage of Lohan breathing and touching her head. She's like taxidermy, really.

So right, since I don't have cable, I was reduced to watching Liz&Dick on Twitter. And if you don't think that is a thing you can do, look up the hashtag and scroll back. Every line, every costume - every hat! and even most of the backdrops were critiqued. At one point there was a robust rally to nominate the Liz&Dick green screen for an Oscar. It was amusing, mesmerizing... and it eventually made me sick. It's one thing to watch something that you yourself think is TERRRRRIBLE. It's another thing to witness an entire nation throwing up their arms in captivated horror.

After about 45 minutes, I closed Twitter, fired up the actual TV, and put on Mamma Mia!

MAMMA MIA YES I DID.

I have seen Mamma Mia! twice. The first time I watched it, I was appalled. The beautiful setting jarred against the dumbness of the movie until I kind of just couldn't compute. After it was over, I immediately played it again with the sound off just to watch the art direction. More on that later.

But last night, it was the only thing that would wash the cynicism of Liz&Dick, and the cynicism of the reactions to Liz&Dick, out of my mind. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but given that the goddamn musical has been on Broadway since 1999, and the movie has grossed about $610 million worldwide (I'm guessing it gets a lot of play in Italy, for some reason), some of y'all have to have bought tickets to this stinker and therefore don't need me to break it down for you.

But if you haven't.

Be warned. There is so much shrieking.

SUMMARY 1: There is to be a wedding on a beautiful yet rugged Greek island. Amanda Seyfried, aka Veronica Mars's dead best friend Lilly Kane, welcomes her two besties and - after a significant amount of shrieking - sings a song with them about finding her mom's diary from the year she was conceived. Seems mom did herself some fucking back then, and Amanda Seyfried's father could be any of three guys. Not more than one of them. That only happens in animals that give birth to litters. Didn't quite catch the name of those besties but don't worry, we never hear from them again.

Meryl, who is mother of the bride, welcomes her besties - Christine Baranski, who is playing rich divorcee, and Mrs. Weasley, who is playing bawdy little tomboy. There's more shrieking, after which we learn that Meryl runs an inn on the island and the inn doesn't make a lot of cash, so she sings Money Money Money while fantasizing about doing a Kate Winslet on some guy's yacht.

FUN FACT #1: The printed textiles hanging on the laundry lines in Meryl's courtyard and piled in vast swathes on the imaginary yacht are by Josef Frank, and cost upwards of two hundred bucks a meter.

FRIGHTENING OBSERVATION #1: I want that to be a weave on Meryl, because if she grew her hair out that long just to fry it up, that is a lot of effort for no reason.

BACK TO OUR SUMMARY: Dead Lilly has invited Meryl's three boyfriends from twenty years ago to her wedding. They arrive.

REALITY NOTE: If my children did this to me... okay well first of all Meryl's exes are 1) an architect 2) a finance dude and 3) an author of adventure travel books. The three boys I might have dated twenty years ago are now probably... 1) no idea, but I could probably tell them which bar to find him at 2) a motorcycle mechanic and 3) actually, an author of adventure travel books. Huh. But anyway second of all, I would die of humiliation.

MORE SUMMARY: Meryl spies the three dudes - played by Skarsgard père; Remington Pierce Brosnan-Steele, and everybody's favorite Mr. Darcy, Colin Firth. She flashes on them in circa 1979 wigs - Firth as a punk is particularly WRONNG.

She embarks upon a LOT of unnerving shenanigans trying to sneak peeks at them in their boudoir, at one point rolling back and forth on the roof putting her fingers in her mouth and tiptoeing her other hand toward a trapdoor. GROSS. What do you think is happening in there Meryl?? Besides Colin Firth with a hose in his mouth blowing a mattress (foreshadowing!). Get your mind out of the gutter.

FRIGHTENING OBSERVATION #2: Bootstrap Bill looks just like John McEnroe for a lot of this movie.

We are meant to understand that it is Brosnan who is Meryl's Most Truest-ish Love. Meryl has a convincing hysterical crying fit during which she actually looks like a person in her forties having a crying fit - and Meryl, who when she does comedy is all cawing and cackling, full-body shrugs and voluminous eyerolls, STILL completely inhabits this trite, somewhat flaky ex-free-spirit character, I mean even when she's just fooling around she still can fucking ACT - and then the women sing Chiquitita and then Dancing Queen.

WHERE I REALIZE MAYBE THIS IS MY MOVIE AFTER ALL: This Dancing Queen scene, which eventually includes the entire female population of the island skipping down to the pier and doing a rudimentary line dance, would make a dead person smile.

After this, I lose the plot a little. Amanda Seyfried gets to know the men? There's a bachelor party with boys dancing in swim fins? A bachelorette party during which Meryl, Christine Baranski, and Mrs. Weasley put on immense bellbottoms and platform shoes and sing a song?

Because at some point in this part of the movie, Meryl and Remington Steele sing a song. They sing "S.O.S." And Brosnan's voice shocks me into near-catatonia every time I hear it. Oh. He sings like someone is jumping up and down on his lungs. It is... the most effortful sound I have ever heard in my life. I know that the singing is looped and that onscreen he is just lipsynching, but I can't look at him with that sound coming out of the speakers and not expect his every blood vessel from about the nipples up to burst. He makes Streep sound like Patti Lu-fucking-Pone.

Did I mention Domenic Cooper as Amanda Seyfried's fiance? He shows up without a shirt pretty frequently. That's his contribution.

Does the wedding go off as planned? No. Is there a happy ending? Yes. More shrieking? Oh certainly. Do we get to see enough Greek island majesty to make me rethink our vacations for the next five years? SHIT YEAH.

FUN FACT #I LOST TRACK: Colin Firth gay shirtless kiss.

Stick it out for the credits, during which the men, Meryl and her girls, and Dead Lilly camp around wearing Freddie Mercury's entire stage wardrobe and sing "Waterloo". The lyrics to that song were one of the readings at my brother's wedding. Nobody was really sure what to make of that.

SINGING SCORECARD
1. Meryl can sing. Well. She "can" "sing," in the way that people in show business can often sing. That is, she sings better than Gwyneth and god knows better than Zellweger, but not as well as Ann. Anne? Too lazy to look it up. She's shown us this before, in the Carrie Fisher movie and in Prairie Home Companion.

2. Amanda Seyfried can sing. She sings "Thank you for the music" over the end credits, and... well, it's An Interpretation. That song may start kind of intimate, but in the end it is a belter, and Amanda Seyfried's voice is so delicate and little that they had to accompany her with like a harpsichord. There is no belting. Agnetha she is not. But she is apparently Cosette in Les Mis. She'll do great.

3. Mrs. Weasley can't really sing. But she is cute with short hair, and she is supposed to be the one who is a little braying anyway. And of course Julie Walters can be relied upon to be adorable in every circumstance.

4. JESUS Christine Baranski is phenomenal. They give her a whole song - "Does Your Mother Know?" that she gets to perform with a batch of hot boy dancers, which is where Christine Baranski belongs at all times. She is just so precise - you can only imagine how much she had to flail it up so as not to make Streep look like a ragdoll. Not only that - she has that old-time Juilliard from-the diaphragm haughty-ass whole-body voice that makes you want to slap on your Norma Desmond turban and FLOUNCE! AROUND! the HOUSE! Peel me a grape!

I love this woman so much I might have to dredge up old episodes of Cybill on YouTube to get a Baranski fix, cause god knows I am not up for watching Julianna Margulies mope around her law firm, the presence of Josh Charles notwithstanding.

Christine Baranski - Does Your Mother Know from Celebrity X-Factor on Vimeo.

5. Brosnan. NO. OW. I feel like I am cleansing some unpleasant part of my body every time I replay his singing scenes.

6. Colin Firth can play guitar. OF COURSE HE CAN. Serenade me, Mr. Darcy!

7. Does Bootstrap Bill sing? He is there in several singing scenes, but I think he is just sort of hollering along. That's ok. Bootstrap Bill has done his duty - he spawned Erik the Viking.

FOR FURTHER VIEWING ENJOYMENT
Meryl doing comedy is generally painful. That raucous shit gets old real fast, and makes you want to watch Meryl doing comedy in which she is not the silly one. So you'll want to watch The Devil Wears Prada, another movie that is not worth the paper it's written on, made great by performances by the likes of Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci, and Meryl.

For a transcendant Christine Baranski scene, you'll find The Birdcage on DVD somewhere. Robin Williams is not as grating as usual, Nathan Lane turns in the performance that will never allow you to accept that he is a straight man again, Dianne Wiest and Gene Hackman are super amusing, but Baranski is just such a pro as the ovum donor.

Ahh, and you want to know why you love Julie Walters? And you want to see more of her character in this movie? Go back to 1985 and watch Educating Rita, in which she charms the whiskers off of Michael Caine. Not that that's particularly hard.

Lastly - you watch this movie and I guarantee it's going to make you want to watch Priscilla. The infamous ABBA show that is alluded to throughout that movie shows up at the very end, and Hugo Weaving (Elrond you RASCAL!) and oh the guy from Memento (Guy Pearce) do a MARVELOUS job with "Mamma Mia."

And now you're going to be wandering around work and a stray line, "That's the name of the game!" or "Honey honey, how you thrill me," will just bubble up to the surface and you'll find yourself singing. And if you're lucky like me, or if you work in a drag bar, someone will chime in with the "Uh huh"s.

This is Your Neighborhood Librarian. Consuming pop culture. Exhuming that pair of ruffled bellbottoms I bought in Spain. And not ashamed of it.

Your Neighborhood Librarian Is Giving you a Long Look

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 03:49:00 +0000

So I'm driving to work, and I go east to go to work, here in Baltimore, and it's kind of different over there. So I'm driving to work, and there's this guy in a van, in a white panel van. Econoline. Driving alongside of me, and he gestures to me to roll down my window. So I roll down my window, and he calls out to me. I'm driving my blue minivan, my Honda Odyssey, total soccer mom minivan.

And he says to me, "You sell this van?" And I, of course, say, "What?" because, you know, people say "What?" when someone says something totally random to them. And he says, "You no want sell this van to me?" and I'm like, "Yeah, no. No. I'll just drive it to work instead."

And you know, he kind of shrugged and smiled at me and kept on going, and took the next right. And I'm driving along, as I was before, but completely baffled. I'm sure I had that look on my face, that baffled look.

Alexander the Great doesn't want
to sell his van either.

You know? What would that... how would that play out? You'd say, "Huh. Sure! I'll sell you my van! How much will you give me for this van? You want to give me five thousand dollars for this van? Eight?" I don't know, I would take eight grand for that van.

What's he going to do? Is he going to shell out a whole shitload of cash? Does he have that kind of roll in his pocket? And then he's going to give me a ride to work? And then take off, like, with my van?

Is it a question of... Where? Else? Could he find a van? I mean, all kinds of places, right? Has he checked the Pennysaver?

It's like you see those hand-lettered magic marker signs on the telephone posts, "WE BUY HOUSES." "WE BUY HOUSES - GOOD PRICES." Who does that work for? You have a house, you've been having trouble selling because it's a rough market, finally you're like, man, I'm under water on this house, I'm going to call the number on that sign. I bet they can help!

Who..? does that? There's got to be someone. There's got to be some percent return on that, some success rate of that kind of advertising, or people wouldn't draw up these little signs and staple them to posts. The investment in tagboard alone! And does this just happen in Baltimore? It can't just be Baltimore.

Although I am beginning to think it's just Baltimore where people beg on the street corner with a bucket and call it fundraising. Not kidding. Not even wearing like a vest, or matching t-shirts - I saw ladies wearing t-shirts that somebody had written on them with marker, the name of a daycare center, and they're walking around with spackle buckets at the intersection just asking for money for this daycare center. What? Isn't your daycare center a business? "We're raising money for the God's Little Superstars Daycare..." Really? Are ya? Cause... I'm a little short today. "I'm raising money for the... librarian lunch fund? That's right." I don't know.

Sure. I'll sell you my van.

Another thing that I think about when I drive back and forth from work - I take like three roads on my commute, it's really simple - and one of those roads is weirdly narrowly lined. The lanes are really really narrow. So you're taking your life in hands shooting the gap between the armored truck on your right and the median. Inches to spare. It's a real... Yaaaa. You pass on the left and you're like "Yaaa-aaa-aaa." That's the sound you make. How am I going to transcribe that?

Anyway that's the sound I make in my mind when I go between the armored truck and the median strip on Erdman Avenue in Baltimore.

And often, even on that particular strip, where people ought to be being super super careful, people are not being super super careful. People are being JACKALS. People are not remembering that the lights are timed the same way every day. You are going to hit that light by the crab shack the same way today as you did yesterday. It is not like we're getting tourists coming down Erdman Avenue at 8am. But they try to zip out in between people and zip back in, and you're like, "You know? This is not L.A. You are not a professional driver. Now is not the moment to take your balls in your teeth and shoot forward like a slippery seed. This is the time to hang back, do your thing, and get to work alive."

And it's those times... like, recently, famously (Facebook famously, not real life famously), I wrote a little poem about a guy - a woman, actually - in a four-door sedan. I was driving along, and here she comes from the other direction, swings around in a tight mid-block U-turn, cuts me off.

I screeched to a halt and as I recovered from my near-aneurysm, I looked inside her automobile. I got a good look at this daredevil. And she didn't even see me. She's not even paying attention. She's talking on her cell phone. She may be getting directions. And maybe the person on the phone is saying, "Hey, you're going the wrong way, the pit beef slash titty bar slash mattress store is back the other way! You should turn around!" But instead of putting the phone down and pulling over and looking around, she's mid-block, and "EEeerrrrrt! There you go. I'm turned around! Which way now?"

She's driving the General Lee out here. Hitting the brakes and twisting the wheel. Is she a cop? No. No. She's not a cop. But do you know what she is? She's got this bumper sticker, or, what, one of those stickers in the back windshield, it read, "FORGIVEN." And I was like, "'Forgiven,' huh? Who forgave you? Because it sure wasn't me."

So I wrote a little poem, I put it on Facebook, and it went

Talking on your cell phone
While you hang an illegal U
Your license plate reads '4GIVEN'
But not the fuck by me.

In the aftermath of having put that on Facebook it was suggested that I debut that... little piece of... work at the teen open mic night at the library. Thank you Todd, thank you for thinking so highly of my verse. And of course, I am not going to do that. Though actually that last line would work just as well minus the profanity, in fact ending with 4 syllables instead of 6 would give it a certain gritted-teeth punch, but... I like the profanity.

Which made me think about swearing in the car. I try not to swear out loud with the kids in the car, because I try to teach them that swearing is for very important occasions of chagrin or pain or anger. Swearing has its place. I need them to know that swearing has its place.

When we've had conversations about this, my younger child will always bring up, "LIKE if you drop a pickle jar on your finger, then that would be the right time to swear." And I'm always like, "HEY goddamnit, when I dropped the pickle jar on my finger, did I swear? NO. I was SILENT." In fact, I crumpled to the floor - in silence - cradling my hand, my mouth went... you can't see me, but I'm going "ow ow ow." SILENTLY. The boys came up to me and patted me in concern. They were toddlers at the time, really small, and the older one looks in my face, and he says, "Are you saying 'Ow'?" And I kind of nodded, with the tears rolling down my face. I did not swear.

Although Ezra is right, that is an appropriate time for swearing.

That was back when I was really good about not swearing, because they would pick up on like any random sound that they liked. The word "fuckers" had a brief run.

Hey, jackhole, your light's turned green. Well done, sir!

This is why I use a voice recorder and don't try to TYPE while I'm driving. Texting dickhead.

Where was I? I was talking about swearing.

So now, in the car - I drive a Prius now, we bought a Prius. Very happy with the Prius. And I feel like we now have sort of a third-party mediator in the car with us. Referee, if you will. When somebody does something like I'm about to do to this pickup truck - "Sorrrryyy!" - when somebody does something like that to me, I feel like, hm you know that Prius navigator voice? That lady? With the sliiiight North Carolina accent? Is saying, just like in The Blues Brothers, when the whole Chicago police force, all the Illinois state troopers, are chasing down Jake and Elwood, and they keep cutting back to this dispatcher, this old white guy dispatcher, he looks a little like Skipper on Gilligan's Island, they used basically the same character later on Hill Street Blues, and he's on the old-fashioned radio giving updates, you know, "Calling all cars, calling all cars" and at one point he says, "Use of unnecessary violence in apprehension of the Blues brothers... has been approved."

There's no clip of that, but enjoy this:

Henry Gibson, amIrite? Hee hee. Chicago looks like shit in this entire movie, by the way. I have ridiculous nostalgia for the realities of 1970's cities. Those images explain so much of the conservative Right.

But it's that flat bureaucratic tone - getting back to the dispatcher - that the voice in my Prius recalls.

Honey... don't. I'm right in front of you. Don't cut me off... from the right lane... for no reason.

So I feel like the Prius, in some situations, would say, "Regarding..." and I think I can do this accent, "Regarding... the Escalade on your right rear bumper... use of profanity... has been approved."

I gotta use Audacity to clip that for you, because I just did that really good. [Now that I'm transcribing it, actually no. I'll spare you my impression of my Prius.]

What is an Azera? I have never seen that model of car before. It looks like everything else, and I think it's a Hyundai, but Azera? Do I really watch so little TV that new models of cars can come and go without me even noticing? Because believe me, I am in a part of town where you do not necessarily see the newest models coming out of Japan and Korea.

Wow! Escalade on my right rear bumper, you just ran that fuckin red light behind me! Jeez. Where are her eyes? Nooo, she's not looking ahead either.

People are always talking about how the book is in danger, and that movies, and TV, and ebooks - oh, woe, the ereaders! - are endangering the book. You know what is endangering the book? As well as all of us? The cell phone. The smartphone is endangering the book. Because it used to be, if you were waiting at the pharmacy, if you were taking the bus to work, if you were driving in your car (ha ha that's a joke), you brought along a book.

Aaaaa! Jeez! I wish that she would stop texting because she is RIGHT behind me. And she just zoomed up on my bumper because I had to stop. I didn't think she was going to notice that I was stopped.

There we go, somebody across the way has had just the accident that I just avoided. Ohhhh! Here she comes, up alongside... and STOPS right in my blind spot. And then takes a right into a shopping center. Was there any reason you had to hotfoot it up there just so you could get to the Giant one second earlier? Wuhhhh. Harrowing.

And let me tell you, boys and girls, all this time that I've been talking? My eyes have been on the road. On The Road. I firmly believe in voice recorders. And now I forget what I was talking about.

Oh yeah! What's going to endanger The Book, oh you gotta capitalize it nowadays, the tragic, tragic, endangered, sensory dimensional entity that is The Book? It's the smartphone, because you gotta go to the doctor's office? yeah you could pick up like Golf Digest in the waiting room, but if you're thinking ahead, you'll have brought your most recent cowboy romance novel. Your Every Thug Has a Woman Who Loves Him. Which - I gotta read. I gotta do a comparison between Every Thug Has a Woman Who Loves Him and like Every Cowboy Has a Woman Who Loves Him, and, you know, Every Werewolf Has a Woman Who Loves Him.

"If there's a smile on my face
It's only there 'cause I shot my cousin."

Cause, you gotta wonder, are they the same book on the inside? And I kind of suspect not. I kind of suspect that the thug ones have a whole lot more violence - violence and beejays - and that the cowboy ones are inexplicably gentle. Like the cowboy, not only does he ride a horse and wear a hat, but he delivers calves in a rainstorm and then shelters them under his manly duster as he rides back to the barn leading the mother cow.

That's what I think, I think the cowboys are all like Ryan Gosling, and the thugs are all like Tony Yayo. What does that say about different kinds of women and their differing romantic ideals? There's room for us all.

But if you have your phone, even though you're reading about the manliest man - or werewolf or whatever - in his half-open shirt, when that phone chimes, you'll pull it out and check your email. You'll text your carpool partner back. You'll check in on your Tiny Town and totally get distracted from your book.

Which - I just finished this funny sci-fi novel (Year One), I'm reading nothing but funny sci-fi this summer, and in this book, the rest of the universe, who are of course way more advanced that we are, have some stake in keeping us from becoming more advanced. And I won't ruin the punchline on page 342, but it could easily be replaced with the invention of the iPhone. That's all I'm saying.

Anyway. Here I am pulling in to the library. This is me. Your Neighborhood Librarian. Getting to work in one piece.

Signing off. And punching in. Drive safe, friends.

Your Neighborhood Librarian lies back and tries to relax

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Fri, 04 May 2012 01:59:00 +0000

Why don't I floss? Why don't I FLOSS?

But I don't. So every couple of years, I end up having to have the roots of my teeth scaled, or planed or whatever they call it - I mean, whatever they do call it it amounts to SCRAPED. SCRAPED UGH ROOTS OF TEETH UGH. And you have to get numbed up for it, and now half of my face looks like I have Bell's Palsy again.

You guessed it. This is:

Your Neighborhood Librarian Goes to the Dentist

I had Bell's Palsy once already and it wasn't pretty, ladies and gentlemen! No. Pretty is a thing it wasn't. I looked like I was having a stroke at all times. They need a new name for that shit, "Bell's Palsy" sounds like something that comes in a little yellow cardboard box that you sprinkle on chicken. If I needed to blink, I had to use my finger to shut my left eye. If I wanted to drink through a straw, I had to endure the ridicule of my children. And if I wanted to sneak outside for a smoke after said children were asleep, I had to actually pinch the left side of my mouth closed around the cigarette.

Kim Mulkey, women's bball coach at Baylor,
would dearly like to be able to keep her left eye open.
I feels ya, jocky lady.

You mighta thought I would have quit smoking at that point, but I DIDN'T. NO. I don't have that many vices left, and so I am keeping it up. Here are my vices: I smoke, and I - well I drink, of course I drink, I have little kids - I watch Justified solely to see Raylan Givens with his shirt off, and I don't floss.

Oh, man! Making the f sound with my mouth all numbed up like this makes me make a little fart sound with my cheek. Work tonight is going to be humiliating.

[Once again, Your Neighborhood Librarian is posting from the highway. You live in Baltimore, you see a blue minivan on the Beltway with a woman in it kind of hollering and visibly complaining into thin air, my advice is, give me a wide berth.]

Ok and so I have this not-bad dentist. She is little, and funny, and she's a little bit of a wack job, and she has a nice staff. She's a referral from a co-worker, and I did ask my co-worker first, like, well what do they do while you're an hour in the chair? And she says, "Well just the radio on really, or you can bring your iPod." And I thought, "Hmph."

I'm used to my kids' dentist, with all the little liquid ring-toss games, and the stuffed animals, and the waiting room TV playing Fantasia - which is AWESOME to explain to little kids - well not little kids, I guess my boys aren't little kids anymore. In fact, it is because they're not little kids anymore that we can have these great discussions about the relationship of the music to the images. They totally get it. "The trumpet there is like sunlight!" And it is because they're not little kids anymore that I can tell them the story of the time my friends Billy and Steve took acid for the first time and went to see Fantasia in the movie theater. Except I don't say "acid." I just have to say, "Like, imagine you were a really little kid, or from another planet, and you saw all these symmetrical dancing animal things in all the wrong colors."

Not good when on drugs.

Yeah but Bonnie's office isn't like that. So I get there, and while they are numbing me up - and they numbed me good and proper, I have got to give them that. Man, I am all a fan of being seriously seriously numb for root planing. I like it when somebody is working on my teeth and all that bothers me is the sound. I like it when it just seems like somebody's doing work on a little piece of sculpture somewhere. Tik-y tik-tik tik. That's fine! I don't need any wince-y action. Of course, I end up looking like Frankenstein for the rest of the day, but I don't care that much. Maybe I will later. I gotta work tonight!

[Here I let out a laugh that I'm not sure I ever have heard from myself before - a totally evil cackle. If I could figure out how to put a sound sample online, I would for this.]

That'll be good. But I worked with Bell's Palsy and nobody seemed to notice. So probably no big deal.

So yeah they numbed me up, and the dentist was talking to her assistant, about babysitting her niece and nephew the night before and she said, "You know, I always read them my niece's favorite book, oh she just loves this book! She loves Goodnight Moon!" And I - you know, I been working with children's books for 8 years now, and been sort of critical about them for, well, longer than that maybe, and Goodnight Moon? Goodnight Moon is possibly the children's book I hate the worst in the WHOLE WORLD. Why do we say goodnight to the air? Does that not mean that we're going to sleep in a coffin?

But her 2 year old niece loves it. And she was saying to the other woman, she was saying, "Oh and do you know? they showed me a new one, they showed me Goodnight iPad." And the other dentist was all, "What?! Goodnight iPad, what's wrong with people?" So my dentist says, "No, no, it's really great. It's about turning off all our electronic things. And it's a really good idea, because little Michael, he wants to have that iPad there in the bed with him, he just won't go to bed without it." And I'm kind of spitting out the suction tube to ask, "How old is little Michael?" FOUR. FOUR and he has his own iPad that he takes to bed with him. But, you know, not her kid, so I can't judge. Although.

So the other woman says, "Oh I was just in the bookstore the other day, and I found a really beautiful copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle." Now, Eric Carle, everybody says Eric Carle is a lovely lovely - lovely lovely man, a wonderful man, but me, I've never gotten the where with the Eric Carle. Yeah he makes the pretty paint splotchies on the paper, nice color sense, and he cuts the pieces out in sort of satisfying shapes, then he collages the whole thing up into, you know, various... tedious... books... for little kids. And I don't want to say that too loud because I know the entire librarian community is going to start revving up to throw shit at me.

This is what they look like when they come for you.

Anyway, they're exclaiming about how great these books are, and I was thinking, "Wow, I'm not even going to open my mouth, really" (except my mouth wasn't anything but open, it was open all that time like I am a fucking gargoyle on the corner of Notre Dame cathedral).

Then the dentist walked out of the room and the assistant, she was like, "Do you have any kids?" And I say yeah, they're 8 and 10, and she says "Well I guess you kind of remember reading picture books to them," and I said well actually I'm a librarian and I do service to children, so I read picture books all the time, you know, 5 days a week probably. And she says, she exclaims, "Oh! That's so great!" and I agree with her, yeah, pretty great. And she goes, "AWW. My favorite book, my favorite children's book... has got to be... The Giving Tree."

And I'm thinking to myself WOW! THREE FOR THREE! I hate The Giving Tree. Everybody who is sane hates The Giving Tree. So then she goes, "Do you have a favorite children's book?" and takes the instruments out of my mouth so that I can answer. And I'm like... Ahh. Umm. No. I - I don't. I - You know? I don't. What do you want me to say? I could say, you know, I love The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. I could say we're listening to The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White right now and it's wonderful. I could say... but I... nothing will leap to my mind. Nothing like Horton Hears a Who ever leaps to my mind in this situation. Nothing that everybody else can go, "Ahh yes! I know that book and I like that book. No, my mind goes, "Well, Kat Falls's Dark Life is a super-duper book that I would recommend to any child in his right mind..." and that is not the answer that that person is looking for from me.

So. She scales my teeth. Bad. I didn't eat before I went in there because I had a job interview beforehand, so I left home, I'm wearing my cute little suit, I brushed my teeth like crazy and Listerine-d my face all up, and then I had this job interview, and I'm not going to eat after the job interview because I can't make it back home and brush my teeth, and you don't want the dentist to think you're a slob. So I didn't eat anything, and she's scaling away, and I'm listening to Hall and Oates on the god damn office radio. God Damn the Lite Rock.

Which brings us to Henry Rollins. Henry Rollins in a monologue he did a long time ago, that I had on a cassette tape, and this is from when he was younger, and had dark hair and still pretended he was a punk rocker or a "spoken word poet" instead of being a stand up comedian, which, you know face it folks... Hey you want me to blow your mind? Henry. Has a Blog. On Vanity Fair. YES HE DOES.

In this monologue Henry was describing being a teenager and working in Georgetown in Washington, DC. He worked at the Hagen Dasz, which was probably a pretty sweet gig for a teenager. I worked at Baskin Robbins at about the same time and Hagen Dasz was really high-end. That was late 70s, early 80's maybe. It was the beginning of the whole cult of the brand, when the idea of gourmet popcorn and gourmet ice cream was a mind-blowing blast of innovation. Like Thomas Jefferson up in the mass produced snack food industry. What's next?? we were probably thinking. Gourmet beer? HA ha ha ha.

Sigh. We had no idea the words that were about to be slewn at us. "Artisanal." "Microbrew." You know, we never had minibrews. We went straight to micro. There was Anheuser Busch and then there was Sam Adams and then suddenly there were seventy different kinds of Red Hook. Never a minibrew. You know why? I just figured out why. "Mini" sounds feminine, while "micro" sounds all science-y and butch. Men. Fuck 'em.

HENRY - we're talking about Henry right now, keep up - HENRY had this whole little diatribe about how persecuted he was working in the Georgetown Hagen Dasz as a teenager because the manager - Gary or Larry or Kevin - insisted on keeping the radio tuned to the Lite Rock station. "So that the customers of Hagen Dasz could rock litely..." he said. That was probably WASH-FM now that I'm thinking about it. Ha. Actually I should probably back off on old Hank because I would have pitched a fit about that too. WASH-FM. UGH. Henry, you know, Henry is kind of full of shit in a lot of ways, but right here - he's got a point.

And so lite rock has not improved since those times - it's now 30 years, THIRTY YEARS - and it's still Hall & Oates, it's still Phil Collins, it's still Air Supply, and like they've added that A-O song, and uh, Words Cant Bring me down, which is kind of a pretty song... but in the context of Phil Collins (oh my cousin Stuart is going to kill me) and... and...

I'm not talking bout the live-in
and I don't wanna rape your sight
but there's a cold wind blowin the stars around
and I'd really like to fuck ya tonight*

Um. GOD. ANYTHING will sound terrible in that context. So, aw, jeez, I'm Just Fucking Trapped listening to this music, and the tik-y tik-y scrape sounds of the tiny chisel in my mouth... and you know, here's something that doesn't happen anymore - we're not trapped anymore. You know? You go and you have to wait for a prescription, and you have to do something, and you're not trapped. You have your phone. You're doodley doodling, and you're texting your girlfriend, and checking your email, and you're doing stuff. You're not trapped. You're not sitting there staring at the wall. Wishing - WISHING - for a six-month-old copy of People magazine.

That's what they should do, you know, you want a nostalgic drama sitcom, you don't make Mad Men, with all these people and all this plot, and all the getting off and the smoking, NO! You have half an hour of people sitting waiting for shit not doing anything else. Not able to call someone on the phone, not able to multitask, they're just like sitting there. That's what you're missing, boys and girls, that's nostalgia for you. Those are the good old days. Uh Huh.

So um, I said, I didn't eat before I went to the dentist, and now I'm driving home, and now my face is getting all coooold. Anaesthesia wearing off. And I'd really like to stop at Zeke's and get me a nice coffee with a bunch of sugar in it, but I cannot. Because if I try to drink coffee in this face, it will just spill right out of my mouth and down my front. Probably burn my tongue too. And people will laugh at me, because I know those boys at Zeke's, they are my friends, and your friends laugh at you when coffee pours out of your mouth like your mouth is the mouth of a dead person. Complain to the owner, you say? I could not. He would be the one pissing his pants laughing the hardest.

But. So I'm not going to do that. You know what else I am not going to do? This woman she was like "Ok, well," and she's rinsing me out, and squirting some stuff that is like Betadine but not poisonous on my gums, and she is saying "Ok, there's a lot of inflammation here... we were able to remove a lot of bacteria..." and great, you know two things I like to hear about, inflammation AND bacteria, IN my mouth, "so tonight," she says, "tonight's definitely like an overcooked pasta night, or soup."

And I was like, what is overcooked pasta? Nobody overcooks pasta in my house, there is no such thing. And Also... I'm Starving. And Also... does this mean that before the anaesthesia wears off, I can drive through Taco Bell? And chew things? Running the risk of things falling out of my mouth and onto my shirt, but I am In My Car and I do not give a shit. Or is that actually going to make my mouth bleed?

Oh lovely. There's two guys getting arrested sitting on the curb. Just across the street from where they did a big gun bust.

So. This is your neighborhood librarian. I will not be enjoying any of the treats on offer at the LEGO Club bake sale today. I will not be stopping off at Zeke's to get myself a double Cubano, no milk. I will not be driving through Taco Hell. No. I will be starving to death. Which means I will work tonight and then I will go out with my girlfriends and I will still be starving to death, but that will not stop me from drinking two beers (which is what I do on Mondays, remember?), and getting really really messed up.

I need to sigh right now. Big sigh. God I'm hungry.

Your Neighborhood Librarian. At the Dentist. Signing off.

*all lyrics not guaranteed to be accurate.

GRILL

Thanks, I like yours too! What you have left of it.

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 20:33:00 +0000

When you dye your hair hot pink, as I do (or if you dye your hair Virgin Rose or Fishbowl Blue or Iguana Green), sometimes that is the only thing people can see about you. Fair enough. If I meet a person who has pierced that spot right above your nose between your eyebrows and put a ring through it, that may be the only thing I will be able to see about him or her, at least until I get to know that person a little better.

No I'm not going to put a picture of someone with that piercing right here. Thank me later.

But I feel I ought to document some of the observations I have been able to make while being that person with the cape of long pink hair for I think six years:

Some people assume that you are WIIIILD and CRAAAAZAY and tell you things you don't want to know. Note to swingers: KEEP IT TO YOURSELF I DO NOT WANT TO KNOW.

Some people assume that I am a dangerous freak and possibly shouldn't be allowed to raise my own children. Note to customers at BJ's: I'm fine, really. Everyone yells at their kids sometimes.

Some people think that it is REALLY FUNNY that I am a librarian. Note to old men in bars: you have NO IDEA how diverse librarians really are. Except for the fact that we are almost all women and almost all own cats. So, actually, only kind of diverse.

Also, if you have to ask:

Yes it's natural. I was born this way.
I get it this color by eating a lot of shrimp, like a flamingo.

So far, nobody has asked my WHY my hair is this color, except very small children. Small children get a pass. Small children get it when you say, "Because I think it looks pretty." Small children sometimes buy the line about the shrimp. Small children sometimes don't even look twice. Tiny babies don't like it though. They are not sure what's going on, but they know it's not supposed to be that color. Older babies assume it's part of a toy, and try to eat it. But of course, older babies try to eat everything, so the color of my hair may not be a factor.

But the most common comment I get is, "I like your hair." Most of the time I am pleased to say, "Thanks," and move swiftly along. I mean, who can argue with a compliment?

That last question was rhetorical. I mean, obviously the answer is, "Me, that's who." I can argue with a compliment. Oh yeah. I can get downright riled about a compliment. Because, you know, it might sound innocuous, but in fact there are at least three distinct versions of "I like your hair."

There's the actual compliment, which usually comes from a person to whom I can truthfully respond, "Thanks! I like your boots!"

Then there's the "I like your hair" that comes from a place of, "I am quite threatened by the fact that you are different looking and I am going to throw it right back at you."

Thirdly, there is a species of man who says "I like your hair" but who really means "You have pink hair, I bet you are a unusual in other ways too," which can be further translated to, "I bet you put out." No, I am not kidding about this. Really icky guys have assumed that any female whose physical presentation runs counter to what they are familiar with is EASY ever since... ever since the friggin suffragettes. Ladies - if you have ever been a punk rock girl, a hippie chick, or a goth, and god knows if you're a roller derby mama - you know what I'm talking about.

It's pretty awful. The most vicious, sarcastic responses roll through my mind sometimes in response to the innocuous, "I like your hair."

"My what?"
"Well that's a relief. I did it just for you and I was hoping you'd like it."
"Thanks. You must really know a lot about grooming - I've been appreciating your odor from all the way over here."
"Thanks. I like your attempt to provoke a conversation with me."
"No I will not give you a blow job."
"Thanks. I like your facial sores."
"Well, shit. Now I have to dye it back to blonde."

Your Neighborhood Librarian Has a Monkey on her Back

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 01:50:00 +0000

Oh my god. Here's a saga. The worst kind of saga, really, because a good saga, a really good kind of saga would have some heroes, swords, boats... or maybe it would be a family saga, with adultery and illegitimate children, sweeping landscapes, sunsets, horseback riding, estates handed down.

There would be Kim Cattrall with brown hair (still on her back though I see) and Don Johnson in a ponytail wig. OMG that's who Coach Taylor looks like! Don Johnson! Wow.

But this isn't that kind of saga. No, this story I am sad to say is not the kind of John Jakes melodrama that happens to Randolph Mantooth and Delta Burke, nope. It is instead the kind of saga that happens to you and me, the saga about something that needs to happen but that just... doesn't happen. Something that needs to get done that just... somehow cannot become done.

A thing that is like that square wheel on the wheelbarrow, the worst wheelbarrow ever manufactured - who makes a wheelbarrow with a square wheel I ask you? You push it and push it and it is just never going to roll. It is a story of Fuck You I am Going to Place a Bomb Under You and You Will Move THEN Won't You You Piece of Shit.

Like that.

It's about an old sofabed. Not about Vikings or Forsytes, no, not about bastard children or kidnapped ranis. This is about a bastard couch. One that won't go away.

Your Neighborhood Librarian Gets on the Couch

All right so my old couch, we had that couch a long time. Since... about since Bob moved in with me. I'm going to go ahead and say 1997. He might not. Before that, I had a blue velvet couch, synthetic blue velveteen flocked with tiny fleurs-de-lis, that I'd inherited from my ex-boss at a company that published medical textbooks.

It was pretty awful. That couch was... I was almost proud of that couch being so awful. I was happy that I was the kind of person who had a hand-me-down couch from her ex boss who clearly had NO TASTE. But it was a couch and you could sit on it. You could even sleep on it, as many many friends would attest if they were still my friends. Different story.

Eventually I hated it too much though, and I went into Jennifer Convertibles in New York City and bought a floor sample sofabed in an extremely unpleasant brown and brown brocade. Brown and brown with maybe a little weak green. It had a sheen to it, that brocade. Unpleasant.

Baby, husband, cat. 2001, Brooklyn.

But we had the couch. Very deep couch, I'll say that. Comfortable to sit on. In a small apartment you live your life on the couch. We ate our meals sitting on that couch, watched Buffy. The first pictures of our baby were on that couch, our old baby that is. That means that we watched New York One in September of 2001 on that couch too. But let's focus on the baby.

And then we moved to Baltimore, brought the couch with us. Bought a house, had another baby. Bob's mom came for a visit and we wanted her to have a little more support when she sat, so I found out how to re-stuff the cushions, I bought batting and did that whole little project, plumped them back up real firm. Couple of years later I did it again because - oh I'm telling you, I'm never going to buy a couch with down cushions again. Down smushes.

Soon enough, though, the upholstery of the couch started to get really frayed. That brocade wasn't as durable as one would have thought, given how ugly it was. I mean that.

[Here I whistle Rhapsody in Blue for a while. I recorded this story driving to A.C. Moore to buy a giant block of wax because I was going to make wax hands for our school's Film Club's 90 Second Newbery Award Film Festival entry, Dead End in Norvelt. One of the main characters dips her hands in molten wax to loosen up her arthritic joints and this causes the protagonist to faint, which is a scene we cannot not film, but there's no way I'm directing a fourth grader to stick her hands in hot wax. So I'm doing it myself. Coating a pair of work gloves in wax so that the kid can put them on and pretend to have just boiled her hands in wax. I think my interlude of whistling Gershwin might have been me reckoning whether this was, in the words of the Bard, a Good Idea? Or not.]

2005

So I went to a... you know, I used to research the crap out of stuff. When I think of the trouble I used to go to... anyway I found this warehouse that sold remaindered upholstery material, and I went there with my mom and looked at all their huge bolts of fabric and jeez louise upholstery fabric is so awful, isn't it? Oh my god it's terrible. None of it is any good. That brown-on-brown brocade, we learned, after looking at fourteen hundred bolts of ugly fabric, that brown brocade was pretty darn nice.

2007

Anyway, I picked out a fabric. It had frogs on it. Yep. And we had a slipcover made. And because this is waaaay beyond any kind of expertise of mine, we asked the guys at the fabric place to recommend someone who could do this, and so this awesome little tiny old Portuguese guy with the biggest shears you have ever seen in your whole entire life came to our house and measured the crap out of the couch, every little nook and cranny, and with his huuuge shears, I mean the kind of shears that could snip the head off a baby, cut up the pieces of fabric and took them away with him.

And then for almost as much as we paid for the couch in the first place, we had a very durable custom slipcover with a pattern of frogs on it. Very nice. Very happy with that slipcover. And we had that couch, sitting under its slipcover of frogs, for many years.

In fact, that couch is kind of central to the identity of another project I am involved with. The key image of that project is always the kids and me or their friends or relatives sitting on that couch reading.

Illustration by Todd Brizzi

But eventually, like everything, the couch had to die. The couch got to the point where if your head accidentally clonked back against the back, it was like hitting a railing, because all of the padding was gone from the arms and from the back. And short of taking it all apart and repadding it, there was no way to resurrect it. And it was a sofabed and we didn't need a sofabed anymore. And the slipcover was getting bald and faded and shiny too.

2009

So the kids and I went to a furniture store - hate furniture stores, oh my god I always end up feeling so ripped off. And just... picked out a couch. Like, it kind of took us less than 45 minutes, we walked around and sat on a hundred couches and went like, "Yeah. This one, fine." I mean, it's kind of funny. It took me four years to decide that the green I wanted for the living room walls was the right green, and longer than that to find just the right coffee table, but couch? I was like, 'arms and a back, check; seat, check; not made out of chipboard, SOLD.'

Of course the floor model had a price on it, $728, and we sat down and we looked at all the fabric samples and the books and compared the bla and the bla, and the guy came back and he was like, "$1900."

And I'm like "What the...? How does that happen? Okay you're going to try to charge me a hundred dollars for delivery, but where does the rest of this come from? I am not actually asking you to cover this thing in woven platinum strands, you know. What is that floor model upholstered in? What do you want to to tell me? That that's not actually upholstered, you just kind of wrapped it up in plastic bags? from the Safeway? Because whatever that sample couch is upholstered in, that's what I want. Itchy brown synthetic tweed? Sounds beautiful. We will just not sit on it when we're wearing shorts. I can do that. Because I wanted to pay $728 for a couch and not NINETEEN HUNDRED."

I mean that's bullshit. I would have gone to Design Within fucking Reach if I'd wanted to pay two grand for a couch. Although. I wouldn't. Because at DWR, of course, the most deceptively named company on the planet, none of that stuff is within reach. And then even if you close your eyes and pretend you're like Courtney Cox or some such, the kind of person who buys such things, and you buy a lovely modern armchair, the nicest piece of furniture in the house, then you're going to get two cats for Christmas and they are going to see that gorgeous red bouclé fabric and decide it is just the most delicious thing to sink their claws in ever, even when you put the double sided tape up on the chair and put the scratching post right next to it and have squirt bottles of water always at hand to aim at them when they do it.

And then you're going to have to close your eyes every time you pass through that corner of the living room so that you don't see the little cat-claw pulls in the red bouclé, and with your eyes closed you can't help stepping on LEGO OW OW OW OW and you end up yelling at the kids when it's really your own damn fault for buying nice furniture. It's not worth having nice things.

Ahem. That red chair is very pretty but it's not worth having nice things.

And of course what's on the floor model is "a discontinued fabric." Yeesh. Furniture salesmen. Liars! FURNITURE SALESMEN ERGO IKEA. There's a logical construct for you. Cause and motherfuckin' effect.

Well we end up ordering the couch. In grey. A plain dark grey that I didn't think we'd live to regret too badly.

The new couch, 2011.

Of course, back then we only had the one cat. And that was the cat who ran and hid under our bed the day we brought the first baby home from the hospital and who hasn't really come out since. Her and her late sister both. Really. Of the seventy-five thousand photographs I've taken since the first child was born, there was never a single frame that captured both a conscious cat and a conscious child. That picture above? Kitty crept out after the baby fell asleep so that she could curl up and sleep near her man. She is very attached to Bob. She's a very vocal cat, at night she stalks around the upstairs going "Bob! Hey Bob! Where are ya? Why are all the lights out?" Not very smart. And god when he's out of town she's really confused. "Bob! Bob! Bob! Bob? You down here? Bob? This shoe smells like you! Is that you Bob? No that's a shoe. Bob! Hey!"

And it is not like there is any basis for the skittishness exhibited by herself and her late sister. Nothing Has Ever Happened to this cat. Or her late sister. And it's hard to believe either of them have or had the imagination to think up horrors that small boys might inflict on helpless cats.

And in fact, now that we have new cats, our boys are cuddly and gentle and playful with them. So there, you old bitch. But the new cats do shed on the new couch. Oh well.

The night before the new couch was delivered, which I wasn't there for, I don't know how I was not there for that but I wasn't and that was pretty neat, the night before it came we hauled the old couch out to the porch.

And then immediately after it came, I took off all the back cushions and lined them up on the futon in the basement to make a kind of giant couch for where we watch movies, and I put a whole ton of throw pillows - oh my god this is the whole other reason we got a new couch I forgot about this part!

HEAD LICE.

My kids' school for a while there got head lice on like a CONTINUOUS BASIS. Once a month the letter would come home from school, some kid had lice and we'd have to scan scalps. All clear though, for years. But last spring I guess it was it was just our turn. Oy. Shaved the kids' heads, suffocated all the pillows and comforters, washed the bedding. And among the things I put in those giant Ziploc bags that they might as well just call the Die Lice Die bags were the cushions from the back of the sofa.

So for a month we just used throw pillows on the sofa, and I got to like it. I don't care for the cushions anymore. Pillows are more colorful, more arrangeable. I am pro throw pillow.

Shaved heads, no cushions, 2011

NEXT

Old couch is sitting out on the porch, and we have a covered porch, it's going to be ok. I figure we'll call for a bulk trash pickup from the city, Baltimore does free bulk trash pickup, they come around once a month and you have to call ahead of time to get on their list but it's a terrific service of this city. In our neighborhood it's the second Friday.

Meanwhile, our annual block party came up, and we carried the couch out to the street and set it up next to the pig roaster. It was cool, it was like having a living room in the middle of the street. At the end of the day, though, after the sun went down, it started to rain. And bless our neighbors and friends, eeeeeverybody pitched in and hauled everything double-quick out of the rain. Most stuff ended up on the closest porch to the party, at an empty house on our block.

I didn't even notice until the next day. The next day, I walked across our own porch and I was like, "Where the hell's the couch?" I had to sort of prowl up and down the street until I saw it under cover on that porch. So I thought, "What difference does it make?" and just figured we'd leave it there until bulk trash day, and call for the pickup from in front of the empty house. The thing is a goddamn brick, by the way. You try to lift one end and it's at least five times as heavy as you expect it ought to be. The lady who owns the place is not trying to sell the house, her renters have moved out, the porch is deep and the thing isn't going to rot in the next couple of weeks, so ehh, I left it there.

Could you call that illegal dumping? Yes you probably could.

AND THEN

End of January we went on a little vacation, a little burn up some frequent flyer points trip. And as we pulled out of the driveway pre-dawn to go to the airport, what should I see but my couch sitting out in front of my neighbor's house. Sitting there. Like a massive grumbling wino. Three weeks before the bulk trash pickup date.

"What now is this?" I griped. "How did that get out there?"

So apparently it's out there the whole time we're on vacation, and a thread starts on the neighborhood listserv about the hobo looking couch on the curb, and my non-neighbor the absentee homeowner, who is still on the listserv even though she's been gone a while now, replies saying that friends of hers pulled the thing off her porch and she has scheduled a bulk trash pickup.

Ok. FINE. She couldn't have known I was going to call it in and have it hauled away. But of course we - we who live here - don't want to leave the damn thing on the street for three weeks, so when we got back from vacation my husband and I carried it back down the street and onto our porch. Only fair. Our couch. Our porch.

And so the night before the bulk trash pickup, we moved the goddamn thing, actually Bob did all by himself, moved it back down off our porch and up three houses to in front of her house. Because you do not, you know, you do not want to mess with Baltimore's municipal sanitation guys who are doing your bulk trash pickup. If you tell them a thing is going to be in a place at a time, you do not have it be somewhere else. Respect the process.

So bulk trash day comes. Bulk trash day goes. The couch stays. Of course.

I call Baltimore's 3-1-1 Center - Your Call to City Hall™ - and I have got to say this for Baltimore, there's a whole lot of crap in this city that is broken, that does not work, that possibly may never work again, but that 3-1-1 system is fuckin' fabulous.

a fictional portrayal of CitiStat

We're a bit famous for it actually. Among city planners. Shut up. City planners have celebs just like everybody else. Back when my husband worked for the city, Baltimore City hosted some kind of international symposium of city planners. They were here to see CitiStat and to learn about 3-1-1, and they had meetings and demos and took a tour.

Bob remembers a couple of the British planners being like, "Goodness, these marvelous computer thingies of yours are quite whizzy and it seems it's just a doddle to report an injured hosepipe or what have you, and it's lovely that the caller immediately gets an electronic mail confirming his or her conversation with your switchboard Susie, but, er, have any of you noticed your streets lately?"

Apparently, potholes in Britain aren't anything like the axle-breakers we have around here and they thought maybe one less ORACLE programmer and one more asphalt truck might be a more strategic deployment of city funds.

What the hell do they know. 3-1-1 is my fucking hero. The woman that I speak to says, "No, I don't see that there has been a bulk trash pickup scheduled for any address on your street in, let me look, THE PAST YEAR." So you know, I assume that my non-neighbor just didn't do it right. Or she dreamed she did it. GOD.

So I scheduled a bulk trash pickup for - you know, I said this saga was boring, did I not? I absolutely did. If you're still reading now, there's got to be something wrong with you. Because, because I don't even have an ending for this story! This is such a terrible saga that the answer is that the couch is back on my porch, where it will stay until sometime in March, at which time we will schlep it back out to the front sidewalk again, and possibly herniate ourselves doing it.

And if somebody gets a hernia? That would be like the most exciting thing that has happened in this story. Right? It's terrible. Terrible! Maybe a raccoon will nest in the couch while it is on our porch. Maybe we'll come out of the house one morning and there will be a junkie sleeping on it. That would be a story.

This? This is not a story. This is Your Neighborhood Librarian. Getting Shit Done. And I love you.

2012. The End.

Your Neighborhood Librarian Goes Out 40

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 23:37:00 +0000

My friend Laurel has so many good ideas she has to dole them out like Communion wafers.

"Body of Christ," she'll murmur. "You should write a picture book biography of Thor Heyerdahl."
Next person walks up. "Sanguinis Christi. You need to open a gelato stand in Collier Heights."

"Mother of God," she said to me one gusty December night getting hammered on tequila on my porch. "You're going to write a series of blog posts about getting shit done."

I had been complaining about having to do jury duty and judge a book award and how difficult it is to slot all this stupid shit in to the crappy December turmoil that is December, and she says, "You really need to make it a thing: Your Neighborhood Librarian Gets Shit Done. Your Neighborhood Librarian Renews Her Driver's License. Your Neighborhood Librarian Gets a Mammogram."

And you know, it's not a bad idea.

Your Neighborhood Librarian Gets the Oil Changed

So there I am and I'm relatively hung over because it's a Tuesday and that's my thing on Tuesdays, I'm a little bit hung over. I spend Monday nights with my girlfriends and recently each of us has had more than our fair share OF DRAMA and we have to soothe each other's way through it, and that usually means a BUNCH of cigarettes and some alcohol. For me that's two beers, okay, two beers. If you think I am immoral or dissolute or something for having a hangover on a Tuesday, I drink TWO BEERS on Monday night. All right so last night I had three.

I have to go out to the car dealership to get my oil changed and that's way the fuck on the other side of town. Past town. Through the county. Into another county. Because that's where we bought our car and the dealer gives us one free oil change for every four. So in order to save thirty-two dollars and seventy five cents on the oil change I spend like seventeen on gas and drive way the fuck out to Ellicott City.

It's ok. I take the highway. I know what I'm doing. I contemplate things. I look at the sky. I do not turn on the radio. I put on my sunglasses EE. Mediately. I get off the interstate at Baltimore National Pike, Route 40 West. The in fact by-god National Road.

Baltimore National Pike from the Baltimore city line out to the Patapsco River is a cornucopia of middlebrow temptation. I wrote that on Facebook. On my phone I did. It's a Cornucopia of Middlebrow Temptation. There is Taco Bell. There is WalllllMart, which I NEVER go in, but Jesus Christ wouldn't some discount fleece pants be just the perfect thing right now? There is the overstock furniture place, which is having a Warehouse Moving Sale, and I haven't bought any furniture made out of chipboard in YEARS, and who the hell do I think I am not buying furniture made of chipboard? That is who I am. I am crappy chipboard chest of drawers people.

There are dollar stores of every stripe. There's Latina Tienda Mercado. There's H-Mart! There's Hanoori, which will have dumplings filled with weird protein shit that I won't want to think about but which will be deeeelicious. Salty and greasy. There's Kabab Hut, although no, I don't want a kebab right now.

There's the hair braiding place. There's NTB, which is like National Tire Something, but I always think it sounds like Off Track Betting, and so I always want to go in just to see. Because I already reek of cigarette smoke and despair, so it couldn't get any worse, right? There are HUUGE beauty stores that my cousin The Talented Cousin Rachel goes into to try on wigs.

There's the carpet warehouse, where they will RIP you OFF like you are a tag on a stolen mattress.

And when I was in high school, there was a place called Color Tile right along here, I forget what they sold, formica or something, and during the campaign for Senior Class President of Catonsville Senior High School my senior year, Scott Clendaniel campaigned on the very solid basis that what you really want in a Senior Class President is the ability to raise a ton of money so that you can have a good prom. "Because I would like to have our prom somewhere great," he said from the podium, "But if you want to have your prom at Color Tile, go ahead, vote for my opponent." He didn't win, but it was a pretty compelling argument, and in fact, if you watch Friday Night Lights, Tyra Collette wins the same office on basically the same platform. Except she is very explicit: "We want our prom to be good so that we can all get laid," and Scott Clendaniel didn't quite have the balls to get up on stage at Catonsville Senior High School and go there. Scott, I know you grew 'em. Out there. Wherever you are. None of us debate team G and T class kids would have had the stones to do that.

Anyway. Where was I? Route 40. So I get out to the dealership, and I'm kind of happy about doing this today, because I'm just going to sit there and read my book, and play Jewel Breaker or whatever on my phone, and I could really use that solid 45 minutes of total bland inertia. Inertness. Inertability.

Um.

I really could.

Plus, since we recently got the car towed, there's still that chalk shit on the windows about what car it is and when it got towed, and so every time I drive the minivan I see that date staring me in the face, 12-24-11, just reminding me of one of the Very Best Christmas Eves We Ever Had. And one of the things they do when they change your oil is they wash your car, so after today maybe we can Put That Behind Us. Although one of my husband's co-workers suggests that for the next six months or so, if ever we disagree about something, I just hiss, "CHRISSSTMASS EEEEVE, motherfucker."

They also check the tire pressure when you get your oil changed, and we've had that little tire pressure light lit up on the dash for about two weeks now, and I just could not be fucked to get out of the car at a service station and get my hands all dirty, kneeling on the wet pavement getting grit on my tights to put the little thing on the tires and pump them up and use about a million quarters because how come it always seems to be me doing that? I'm a lady. I'm a lady and I'm getting my hands all dirty doing that. So I know they'll do that too.

They do. I sit. I sit quietly and everyone else is playing like Jewel Brick Slasher on their phone too, and the TV is on, of course, and of course it is on CNN and they're up in New Hampshire. There are pictures of Ron Paul, who I always mess up and call Ron Jeremy, and Rick Perry, who I swear I thought was the lead singer of Journey, and I get that wrong every time, and I kind of wish it was. Seriously, if Ted fucking Nugent can run for office, how come we can't have a Portuguese-American falsetto singer in the White House?

Anyway, I don't pay any attention to that. I read my book. Which is also a thing that Laurel suggested, there you go Laurel you are just completely running my life, I might as well just hand over my checkbook. Lot of good that would do anyone. And they change my oil. And there was horrible music playing! My God. This is probably where I got the whole Journey thing, I haven't been able to get "Separate Ways" out of my mind since. And then right after that,

You say you stand by your man
Tell me something, I don't understand
You said you love me, and that's a lie
And then you left me, said you felt... shy

There are some things I can't explai-hain away - *

WHAT is that SONG? It's Clash, is it just called Stand by Me? So they play that, which is fine, you know, Clash, I'm singing along in my head, and then the very next song that comes on is Seasons in the Sun! Terry Jacks!

Good bye PaPA please pray for me!
I was the black sheep of the FAmily,
Too much wine and too much song,
I didn't know right from wrong
And... I'm just dying now...*

And if I wasn't quite so hung over, it would be funny, but I'm pretty hung over, so it's not funny, and it kind of makes me want to stick a pin in my scalp.

But the oil change is indeed free, and it's done, and I get out to the car, and they've washed it, but the chalk is not off the windshield. Grease pencil. China marker. Something like that. Not chalk. It still says 12-24-11, subtitled The Worst Christmas Eve Ever.

Although really, I say that, but I was just saying to my girlfriends last night, we have all endured so much drama this holiday season, a lot of fuckin drama - jobs lost and morbid in-laws and spending Christmas Eve in a TRAILER and cats in trees and husbands that couldn't bend their arms for a week - but look, our KIDS have been AWESOME, have they not? And there's really nothing more important than the kids.

No, I mean RIGHT THERE.
Nothing behind us but chain link and Baltimore

None of our kids have been to the emergency room, no kid was, like, asleep in the car when it got towed, no kid actually fell off the lip of Ravens stadium where we were sitting - oh look there it is out the window right now (I was driving and recording this). I was right there, above the sign - above the sign! I'm going to find a picture of that and put it on the Internet. ABOVE THE SIGN. Trying not to throw up or soil myself for three hours. I am phobic about heights. Up high, my body says, "Eject all effluvia and FLEE. FLEE NOW." And it was cold. So cold. I spent three hours clutching the children and wailing softly whenever one of them stood up to cheer.

So, you know, all this crap that has happened, the kids have been great. I'm bitching about nothing. The Worst Christmas Eve Ever is not the worst Christmas Eve ever. Not only were they not in the emergency room and didn't get towed with the car, but they were not dicks. Which can happen.

Where was I? Oh yeah. I picked up the car. And it still had the scrawl on the windshield. And that's when I go to Han Ah Reum. Which I can't pronounce, and they know that nobody can pronounce it, and so they changed it to H-Mart, but I never remember that, and then when somebody says it I think they mean K-Mart, so I just call it the big Asian supermarket on 40. And all I want to do, I want to buy some peeled garlic, because I'm running out of stewed garlic. Garlic jam is what I'm going to start calling it. Like the bacon jam. Garlic jam is even easier to make. And "stewed garlic" sounds gross.

Maybe I could do bacon garlic jam. I'm a genius. I am going to. I am going to make Bacon Garlic Jam! I know just how to do it! I'm going to invent this recipe, and I'm going to... I'm going to once again not be rich. Man. I'm totally going to do that.

So I'm going to H-Mart, and they have got chive blossoms, that's cool, and they've got pears, once they ripen up they should be very lovely to eat, I love a juicy pear. They've got my garlic. I buy the biig thing of garlic, no messing around with the garlic. They've got nice looking onions at a good price. Some fresh pork bones, I think maybe I'll make chili. Chili would be good, I've got a sister in law coming for a visit this weekend, she likes chili. I'll make that.

And I'm scanning all the pork stuff, and you know, I am not squeamish about pork. I just carved an entire fuckin pork on New Year's Day, we roasted a 110 lb pig for 8 hours and then cut it up and ate it and it was just me and this one other guy who cut it up entirely. Including the head, including sticking my knife into the eye socket and fiddling out the meat. From the eye sockets - plural - of a mammal. All right? Not squeamish. This is not a problem that I have.

But. H-Mart. Has. In its pork section, along with the strips of ribs and trays of chops and aforementioned neckbones, in these pink styrofoam tubs just like the ones that the ground pork is in, they have this squiggly looking sort of puffy... inguinal type... matter. And it's labeled Pork Uteri. Uteri. Uteruses. This is a company that cannot spell "bean" right 100% of the time - cannot get its act together on how you spell "okra," and they get the plural of "uterus" correct? Just so that I can stand there and think, "If I were a squeamish person I would probably be running for the exit right now. Or god help me if I were pregnant?"?

I didn't take a picture. They really frown on you taking pictures in the grocery store, I've been kicked out of more than one for that. As if industrial spies go around with 35mm cameras and toddlers. I did however, a couple aisles on, I did see one of those things you put in the sink to keep the crap from going down the sink? And they called it a "sink hole garbage saucer." Which was so perfectly apt for the way I was feeling at the time - and I'm feeling much better now, thanks for asking - that I had to take a picture of that. So I did, and I was really really sneaky.

I pulled out my phone, and I made it look like I was checking my email. I did check my email just in case someone was looking, and I made it look like I was sending a text, I turned my phone sideways even though it doesn't have a keyboard like that, and I held it down and angled like as if I had bifocals - well I do, I have trifocals, but that's not how you do it if you have trifocals. Luckily nobody came around to check - anyway I took a picture of the sink hole garbage saucer very sneakily and got away with it.

I never get why they get so mad about taking pictures in the grocery store. Also Starbucks. Isn't it in their best interest to let me stay and spend my money? Are you really not going to let me buy my goddamn nori crackers and rice scooper and oyster sauce - I can't believe I bought oyster sauce hung over. Can you believe I bought oyster sauce hung over? I was able to contemplate like seventeen different brands of oyster sauce - oyster flavored fish sauce to be very precise - ON a HANGOVER. I am hardy, ladies and gents. I am a hardy, hardy bitch.

So then I left. I put the stuff in my reusable grocery bag. The bag broke. This bag that we've had ever since recycling was invented, the bag broke. Luckily the oyster flavored fish sauce didn't hit the pavement and explode. I might not have been able to hold it together spattered with oyster flavored fish sauce after my encounter with pork uteri. Not that hardy.

And that's it, you know? I am hung over, on a very bright shiny day, and still getting stuff done. I went to the Han Ah Reum and I didn't forget anything. I always forget stuff there, that place overwhelms me kind of a little bit, pork uteri et cetera. And I didn't forget anything. I even found a water bottle in the van. I drank a little bit of water. You know how sometimes you're so dehydrated it doesn't feel like the water is actually making it to your stomach? You can feel it absorbing through your mucus membranes. It hits your gums and you can feel your gums sucking up the water. It hits your throat and you can just feel it trickling into the walls of your esophagus. It makes it sort of to the stomach but mostly it's just sucking into the tissues of your poor dehydrated body.

Two beers, ladies and gentlemen. Two beers.

All right. I'm going to go. Signing off, this is Your Neighborhood Librarian Getting Shit Done. Next up... let's see I'm not due for a mammogram for a while - no I know! Next up, we'll have Your Neighborhood Librarian Gets the Emissions Tested on the Minivan! Thanks! See you then.

Talk to you later.

*Not all lyrics 100% accurate.

ALL THE DRINKS: Index to The Advil Calendar, 2010-2011

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 01:43:00 +0000

I know, I know. Right about now you are thinking in terms of a water-only diet. A detox so comprehensive that not only will your liver be restored to a childlike state, but your skin will glow, your hair will begin to grow out of your head as transparent floss like the hair of angels, your feelings toward all mankind will be tolerant, your actions motivated by kindness and unmarred by ego.

Me too. Really.

But just in case you wanted to see a comprehensive list of ALLLL the cocktails in The Advil Calendar, 2010 and 2011 (there are eighty-two), with links to each post, click the “Read More” thingie.

IN ABC ORDER:

My old drinks books

Alter Kaker: Old Grand-Dad, prune juice. December 23, 2011. ✡
Angry Red Planet: a Bloody Mary gone berserk. December 11, 2011.
Apple-Ginger Jerry: apple juice, spiced rum, ginger ale. December 14, 2010.
Ashes to Ashes: tequila, sherry, cocoa mix. December 9, 2010.
Bacon Infused Old Fashioned. December 22, 2010.
The Beckhattan: bourbon, Cynar, OJ. December 15, 2010.
Black Christmas: peppermint schnapps, Zwack. December 18, 2010.
Black Stripe (toddy): dark rum, molasses, honey. December 23, 2011.
Bloody Hun: Zwack, tomato juice. December 12, 2010.
Bloody Mary: vodka, tomato juice. December 11, 2011.
Bonfire: Grenadine, Amaretto, 151 rum. December 20, 2011. ✡
Café Brûlot (hot pot o hooch): coffee, Cointreau, brandy. December 23, 2011.
Cannibalized Christian: Amaretto, Jack Daniels, Jagermeister, cherry Coke. December 20, 2010.
Cavalli Panther: vodka, Campari, Grand Marnier. December 11, 2010.
Champagne Cosmo: Absolut Citron, cranberry juice, champagne. December 1, 2010.

Me and my best pals out at the bar

Coffee Cocktail: brandy, Cointreau, coffee. December 23, 2011.
Cointreau Teese: Cointreau, crème de violette, apple juice. December 5, 2011.
Countrypolitan: vodka, Cointreau, pomegranate juice, cranberry juice. December 3, 2011.
Cranberry Cobbler: gin, sherry, cranberry syrup. December 12, 2011.
Crystal Lake Surprise: white rum, blue curaçao, OJ, Jell-O. December 14, 2011.
Darker and Stormier: dark rum, Domaine de Canton, ginger beer. December 5, 2010.
Dia del Amor: tequila, St Germain, lime, hot sauce. December 16, 2010.

The Dirty Snowflake: vodka, Kahlua, peppermint schnapps. December 8, 2011.
Dolores Cocktail: rum, Dubonnet, fino sherry. December 15, 2011.
The Dreidel: plum brandy (Slivovitz), cherry liqueur, egg whites, Angostura bitters. December 25, 2011. ✡
Dry Mahoney: bourbon, vermouth. December 2, 2011.
Dubonnet Negroni: gin, Campari, Dubonnet. December 15, 2011.
Eggnog. December 7, 2010.
Eggnog. December 18, 2011.
Enraged Cider (hot pot o hooch): cider, dark rum, ginger, lemon, chili. December 25, 2011.
Feuerzangenbowle (punch): red wine, dark rum, oranges. December 10, 2011.
Flaming Doctor Pepper: beer, Amaretto, 151 rum. December 20, 2011. ✡
Fox Poison: chartreuse, absinthe, green curaçao. December 8, 2010.
Ginger bourbon: Domaine de Canton, bourbon. December 19, 2011.
The Giraffe: tequila, grapefruit juice. December 23, 2010.

The Glitter Dunn: moonshine, Sunny D, Red Bull, Cointreau. December 24, 2010.
The Grinch: Midori, vodka. December 16, 2011.
Guilty Kilt: Scotch, tea, sweetened condensed milk. December 25, 2011.
Guns and Moses: vodka, Maraschino liqueur, Manischewitz. December 22, 2011. ✡
The Gypsy: gin, St. Germain, green chartreuse. December 3, 2010.
Hanukkah Gelt Martini: vodka, Goldschlager. December 6, 2010. ✡
Hendricks Hot Gin Punch (hot pot o hooch): gin, wine, spices, lemon. December 17, 2010.
Inferno: Absolut Peppar, Everclear, Tabasco. December 20, 2011. ✡
Jabba the Hutt's Cumshot Express: tequila, yogurt, beef bouillion, Tang. December 21, 2011.
Jaeger Tea (hot drink): tea, Jagermeister. December 20, 2010.
Jalapeno Margarita: Cointreau, tequila, limes, cucumber, jalapeno. December 13, 2011.
Jedi Mind Trick: cinnamon schnapps, Irish Cream, Midori, 151 rum. December 21, 2011.
Klutzy Mohel: pisco, St. Germain, Maraschino liqueur, grenadine. December 27, 2011. ✡
Le Pere-Bis (hot toddy): Scotch, St. Germain, camomile tea, honey. December 13, 2010.
Livorno: old tom gin, Lillet, Tuaca, orange bitters. December 4, 2011.
London Fog: gin, absinthe. December 8,2010.
Make Merry Martini: vodka, gingerbread liqueur, peppermint schnapps. December 18, 2010.
Manhattan: bourbon, vermouth, bitters. December 10, 2010.
Manischewitz Jell-O shots. December 21,2011. ✡
Master of the Hounds: rye, cherry brandy, Angostura. December 1, 2011.
Monk's Coffee: Amaretto, crème de cacao, Frangelico, Cointreau and coffee. December 23, 2011.
The Moon Walk: Grand Marnier, champagne, grapefruit juice. December 25, 2011.
The Moonraker: St. Germain, Cointreau, champagne, grapefruit juice. December 25, 2011.
Murder on the Roof of the Guggenheim Cocktail: gin, Campari, Lillet, Punt e Mes. December 9, 2011.

Toys in Europe are so much cooler.

Negroni: gin, Campari, Aperol. December 17, 2010.

Nightmare in Pink: gin, St. Germain, Campari. December 3, 2010.
The Northern Lights: Scotch, St Germain, Douglas Fir Eau de Vie, Angostura bitters. December 7, 2011.
Nuremberg Punch: wine, arrack, oranges. December 10, 2011.
The Paddy: Irish whiskey, vermouth, Angostura bitters. December 6, 2011.
Pearl Button: cachaca, Lillet, limonata. December 2, 2010.
Pusser's Painkiller: rum, pineapple juice, cream of coconut, OJ. December 21, 2010.
Ray of Sunshine on a Dark Day I: rum, ginger liqueur, pomegranate. December 22, 2011.
Ray of Sunshine on a Dark Day II: tequila, Cointreau, Campari. December 22, 2011.
Route 17: tequila, orange liqueur, grapefruit bitters. December 24, 2011. ✡
Rum Screwdriver: good rum, OJ. December25, 2010.
Der Schmutzike: vodka, kraut juice, pickle brine. December 26, 2011. ✡
Scofflaw: rye, vermouth, grenadine, orange bitters. December 19, 2010.
Scrumptious Coffee (warm pot o hooch): brandy, dark rum, white rum, brandy, coffee. December 23, 2011.
Sinclair's Grandfather's Drink: Clamato, OJ, vodka. December 23, 2011. ✡
Solstice Cocktail Danny Meyer style: brandy, Grand Marnier, pear nectar. December 22, 2011.
Solstice Cocktail Janice Mansfield style: whiskey, Maraschino liqueur, grenadine. December 22, 2011.

Can you imagine them directing this scene? "Can you push
those down some, Taylor? Liiittle lower? Little bit... ok."

Solstice Cocktail Martha Stewart style: orange vodka, Cointreau, lemon. December 22, 2011.
Sour Cherry Cordial: cherries, whiskey, time. December 1, 2011.
Tuaca Whiskey Punch: Tuaca Jack Daniels, OJ, cranberry juice. December 4, 2011.
The Vesper: vodka, gin, Lillet. December 4, 2010.
Winter Mojito: dark rum, mint, cranberry syrup. December 12, 2011.
Zayde's Ghost: Scotch. December 21,2011. ✡

BONUS FOOD RECIPES:

Maple Bourbon Bacon Jam. December 19,2011.

Raw Meat Spread. December 7, 2011.

✡ These are the drinks I found special for Hanukkah

The Advil Calendar 2011, December 25: BREAKING THE TAPE

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 12:02:00 +0000

IT's Christmas Day and what's in YOUR stocking? If it ain't a prince, an astronaut, Tommy Lee Jones, a secret agent and a Jedi... YOU'RE DOIN IT WRONG

Two-Face and his dual girlfriends, Sugar and Spice

Thanks for sticking with me this long and dark month, this season of insanity, this winter of our discontent and lost items and near misses. Today is Christmas, and those of us who have to do Christmas stuff will either be relaxed and happy, and so we could use a sweetly refreshing, sparkly drink that will enhance our already-effervescent buzz... or we will be secretly, blackly seething, slipping out to the back porch "for a breath of fresh air" far more often than is strictly polite.

And we will be in need of a drink in that case too.

So whether your xmas dinner will be Spice's menu of "a charred heart of black boar, a side of raw donkey meat, and a sterno and grain alcohol cocktail, straight up, baby!" or whatever Drew Barrymore offers Two-Face in Batman Forever (pretty sure there was champagne involved), I've got you covered:

God I hate Radko.

The Moon Walk

Created in 1969 by legendary barman Joe Gilmore at the Savoy Hotel in London to commemorate the first lunar landing, it was the first thing the astronauts had to drink upon returning to Earth. Now that is honoring our servicemen.

1 part fresh Grapefruit Juice
1 part Grand Marnier
2 dashes Rosewater
Shake well, strain into wine glass and top up with Champagne.

Doesn't that sound lovely? Although I might ease back on the Grand Marnier if we are having these with the morning pastries, or if I'm serving one to Mom.

Granted, even Connery could
not have worked that outfit.

We had The Talented Cousin Rachel and her husband, Equally Talented But in a Completely Different Way Tim over for dinner a couple Sundays ago, and Rachel brought a bottle of St. Germain. As is her wont. She kind of doesn't go anywhere without it - we should all aim to be that kind of fabulous. When she gets older she'll probably carry her elderflower liqueur in an ermine purse.

So we tried substituting half St. Germain and half Cointreau for the Grand Marnier in The Moon Walk, and it was LOVELY. Sweet but not sugary, floral but not so girly that Tim and my husband felt their manliness threatened by drinking it. In fact, Rachel renamed the thing The Moonraker, and we all know that there's nothing unmanly about James Bond. Except Roger Moore. So that kind of fouls that up, in a way... but you know what? I may be overthinking this. I'll stop.

But chances are, on Christmas Day I'll have a pot of this warming on the stove:

What? When I hear 'hot ginger' I think 'Prince
Harry with his shirt off.' Doesn't everyone?

Enraged Cider

2 quarts apple juice or apple cider1 two-inch piece of ginger, halved lengthwise
2 chili peppers
1 lemon, sliced thin
1 cinnamon stick
1 cup dark rum
Everything but the rum goes in a medium saucepan. Warm slowly, then allow to simmer for 10 minutes. Turn off the flame and add the rum, ladle into cups.

I adapted this last year from a recipe I found on the Sailor Jerry website. I didn't think their Hot Apple Jerry was spicy enough, so I sifted through the fridge and plonked in all kinds of things. The ginger chili lemon combo was the best one for me. Also, I find that the cider gets weird and separate-y if it's on the stove for too long, and I've had success with apple juice instead.

And for the spectators, the bachelor uncles and ancient aunts, those family members who are neither over the moon nor simmering with rage on Christmas day, I offer one from Danny Meyer's book Mix Shake Stir.

And when I think 'kilt' I think Ewan McGregor
hugging a rooster.

The Guilty Kilt

1 1/2 oz blended Scotch
1 1/2 oz brewed English Breakfast tea, chilled
3/4 oz sweetened condensed milk
smoked tea leaves for garnish (no I don't know where you get smoked tea leaves)
In a cocktail shaker full of ice, shake the Scotch, tea, and condensed milk. Vigorously. Strain into a rocks glass full of ice and garnish with smoked tea leaves.

That's it! Is that it? Oh my god I think that's it. Twenty-five days of ranting and alcohol, and it's all over now. Thank you for dropping in, or sticking with me, or even leaving in disgust.

A special thank you to all my guinea pigs and researchers, the commentators and people whose brains I have picked. Or pickled. Guess what? You're going to write this thing next year, because it has nearly killed me.

To your health, boys and girls. Let's have a good year - vote Democrat, eat high fiber, avoid excess packaging, and don't pee in everyone else's pool. I'm out.

The Advil Calendar 2011: ONE: CUT A HOLE IN A BOX Edition

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 05:40:00 +0000

DECEMBER 24 - ROCK IT OUT

The funny thing about all this is I'm really more of a beer drinker.

I'll be drinking beer at the Browns game today. They're playing at M and T Bank Stadium, so I guess you'd have to call it the Ravens game, but my poor husband is a Browns fan so we're humoring him. Do you know how long it's been since any Cleveland team has won a championship? Here's a hint - you google "Cleveland championship" and the first link that comes back is the Wikipedia entry for "Drought (sport)."

The Browns won the NFL title in 1964, the year of my husband's birth, and before that had won the World Series just after the end of the SECOND WORLD WAR.

Miller Lite? Yeah I'll even go there.

But I'm no football fan. I don't hate it, but it's not my thing. My thing really is beer. I love a hoppy old I.P.A. like Dale's or the Green Flash or Long Trail; a caramel-y Belgian abbey ale like Corsendonk or Rochefort; Mexican lager, Sapporo at sushi, and Baltimore's own crap beer National Boh for when we have crabs.

Some of my favorite friends are the friends who homebrew - Lui, Charlene and Roy are automatically on my list of people who get hot sauce when I make hot sauce, just on the off chance they'll reciprocate with homebrew.

Speaking of Roy... Roy's in a band. It's called Pulaski now but it used to be called Sick, and when they were Sick they recorded a version of a traditional Christmas song that I think perfectly distills my reaction to the holiday. Roy has graciously agreed to... shit, graciously? no, not graciously. He's a punk rocker, he doesn't do graciously. And I respect that. Roy has said he doesn't give a shit if I put the song up on the Advil Calendar as the soundtrack to a montage to the greatest and/or most random images I have used this month in these posts. Yeah, that's more like it.

Enjoy.

And I'm working on an index to all the drinks featured in this year's and possibly last year's Advil Calendar - that'll be up probablyyyy.... well maybe by Christmas night.

Meanwhile, I know you're busy, god knows I am. I mixed up a batch of that Scrumptious Coffee featured on December 23, and my friends Paula and Cheryl helped me drink it. It's good. I might make more. The caffeine is helpful, and there's not so much sugar in it that you'll get that sick old sugar hangover. Hopefully.

Oh and one more funny thing courtesy of my high school classmate Mary Kay, former cheerleader and current competitor for Tim Riggins's luscious brooding love. This is John Denver singing "Please Daddy (Don't Get Drunk on Christmas)," a seasonal favorite in the Mary Kay household. Fat chance, Little John. I've got some good stuff lined up for the Big Damn Day.

Oh and Mary Kay - BACK OFF BABY, RIGGINS IS MINE.

The Advil Calendar 2011, Christmas Eve Eve: LOCALIVOROUS LOVE EDITION

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:30:00 +0000

DO YOU REMEMBER THE TWENTY-THIRD OF DECEMBER

"Localivorous" YES I JUST MADE THAT UP. Shut up. It's the adjectival form of "locavore." I am working very hard on this stuff so give me... ooh look there's a squirrel on the deck!

Ok, so I'm not working that hard. I'm mostly hanging out at the coffee shop, pecking out jokes and trivia in between gossipy visits with the neighborhood retired people, at-home moms, part-timers, baristas, and college students who are fortunate enough to have the time during the day to hang out in the coffee shop.

Fortunate indeed. For there are a few things about OUR coffee shop that make it better than YOUR coffee shop:

The coffee is freshly roasted just down the road in a little warehouse space that periodically catches on fire from all the bean chaff in the roaster chimney.
You can get bacon on anything there.
All the guys who work at Zeke's are frequently bearded, variously burly, non-emo, and all named Zeke. This is true: most of their delivery customers and plenty of the shop customers just figure they're talking to the original Zeke (who in fact is like 12 years old), and the boys don't bother to correct them.
Excellent merch. "Can you draw a coffee bean with a crab on it?" asked owner Thomas Rhodes one day, calling his go-to graphics man, Todd Brizzi, from the road. "Uh, sure," said Todd. "Any particular reason why I would?"
Once a year Zeke's buys a big batch of catshit coffee and charges people like ten bucks a cup to try it. This is the marketing genius that is going to pay for Thomas and Amy's kids to go to college anywhere they like.

In honor of Zeke's (and all the Zekes), and because you, like me, may be having a little trouble focusing, what with the kids home from school and all that goddamn wrapping upstairs waiting to be done, not to mention the cards the cards THE CARDS. GOD. I took a marvelous picture of the children and uploaded it and did up the card and ordered them and picked them up and signed the whole stack of them, and I did this all by about December 18th. Of last year. And never managed to address them and send them out. I hate wasted effort, so I plan to change the date on them from 2010 to 2011 and send them out this year. But it's beginning to look less and less likely, isn't it?

Coincidentally, I shot our xmas card photo at the coffee shop.

Huh. Talk about having trouble focusing. Look what happened to that last paragraph. I never said what I was going to do in honor of Zeke's. In my defense, I also have a chest cold and have lost my voice, and also have two brand-new kitties in our house, one of whom is affectionate and fluffy, while the other is 12 weeks old and likes to ambush my hands while I type.

And I can't seem to stop making candles.

So look, this is my solution. Coffee drinks. All these feature the Poor Man's Speedball combo of caffeine, sugar, and alcohol, and are guaranteed to keep you awake to wrap presents after the kids go to sleep. No guarantee, however, that you won't get so hammered that you just throw up your hands, slap bows on everything and call it a night.

Enjoy these hot cocktails, cold cocktails, punches and a toddy, and while you're at it you may admire the Toddfather's cool logos for some of Zeke's signature blends. 'Coffee bean with a crab on it.' Yeah, he can draw that.

That's the Bromoseltzer Tower.

Monk's Coffee, sometimes also called The Monk's Rope:

1/4 oz. Amaretto
1/4 oz. crème de cacao
1/4 oz. Frangelico
1/4 oz. orange liqueur (Cointreau is fine, but I have heard amazing things about Clément Créole Shrubb, which is supposed to be less sweet, and to have notes of vanilla and cinnamon as well as the orange)
Zeke's coffee

Mix the liqueurs in a snifter and add hot coffee.

Named for a famous B and O line.

Here's one for iced coffee devotees, The Coffee Cocktail:
1/3 brandy
1/3 Cointreau
1/3 cold black Zeke's coffee

Shake well with ice and strain into glass. The Mixer's Manual recommends serving this after dinner, but I would very much drink this on the rocks in a tall glass in the afternoon. Possibly all afternoon.

Nobody calls us that with a straight face.

And a hot punch that's far too much trouble to make, but sure fun to read about:

Café Brûlot

1 orange
12 whole cloves
1/3 cup brandy
1/3 cup Cointreau or other orange-flavored liqueur
3 (2-inch-long) strips of lemon zest
2 (3-inch) cinnamon sticks
1 tablespoons sugar
3 cups hot very strong brewed Zeke's coffee

Remove zest from orange in a single spiral with a sharp vegetable peeler or paring knife. Stud orange zest with cloves. Add to a wide heavy medium saucepan with brandy, liqueur, lemon zest, cinnamon, and sugar. Warm through over medium heat, stirring. Tilt pan over gas burner (or use a long match) to ignite carefully (flames will shoot up). While flames subside, slowly pour in hot coffee. Ladle into small cups (preferably demitasse).

I read about this spectacular item in my Mixer's Manual, but apparently they've been doing it for over a century at Antoine's, where they call it Café Brûlot Diabolique - i.e., not just burned coffee, but devilishly burned coffee!

HOLIDAY BLEND MMXI

Ok and this one is not a coffee drink, but that suck-ass cold I caught turned into a blazing sore throat and I have lost my voice completely. Which everyone but me finds verrrry amusing.

Black Stripe
2 oz dark rum
1 teaspoon molasses
a drizzle of honey
lemon wedge
Put the dark rum, molasses and honey in a coffee mug. Twist the lemon wedge over the cup and then drop it in. Fill the rest of the mug with hot water and stir.

Todd's wife Heather found me this next one while I was mixing up that miserable toddy above (if I had to make it again I'd double the honey, halve the molasses) (but honestly I'd prefer to just warm up a jigger of Nyquil, shoot it, and pass the fuck out). Scrumptious Coffee sounds like eggnog, except with way less dairy and 100% less eggwhite beating. I am pro- anything that reduces the sum total of eggwhite beating in my life.

(Unless said beating results in little meringue cookies, ooh I love those things. Paint the inside of a pastry bag with stripes of peppermint flavored goo and then put the meringue in it and then you get little starlight mint striped cookies. And you bake them in, like, the hot air that comes off the back of the fridge. You practically put them in the sunlight coming in the kitchen window and they bake. Science!)

And that's the tower of the sewage
treatment plant, if I'm not mistaken.

Scrumptious Coffee
48 oz strong black Zeke's coffee
brown or raw sugar
10 oz brandy
8 oz dark rum
8 oz white rum
2 cinnamon sticks
16 oz whipped cream
orange peel

Sweeten the coffee with the sugar to taste. Mix coffee, liquor, and orange peel in a pan. Heat gently, but do not boil. Let infuse for a couple of minutes. Pour into pre-warmed heat-resistent glasses. Float whipped cream on top. Garnish with thin strip of peel of orange and nutmeg.

Now that one has Christmas day potential, yes sirree.

TOMORROW: Oh my god you guys I am totally tapped out. Seriously. I outlined almost all these posts in late November / early December, before the damn holidays ruled the world and before we got two new cats and Bob and I both caught debilitating colds. But somehow I never lined up anything for Christmas Eve. So things might get a little raggedy-endy around here tomorrow. Ahem. More so, that is. Like I might possibly get one of the kids to write it. THAT would be INTERESTING.

The Advil Calendar 2,011 WINTER SOLSTICE EDITION: Get Your Druid On

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 13:30:00 +0000

Given all the hardship I encountered finding Hanukkah cocktails (still haven't recovered from the Eight Nights, Eight Reasons to get Shitfaced Hanukkah Marathon post), I thought finding a suitable cocktail for Winter Solstice might be its own kind of difficult. I was prepared to adapt some Halloweeny thing made with black vodka into a drink for this, the darkest day of the year.

But I was wrong - there are a ton of them! Stick with me, because this post starts kind of icky and twee and then goes seriously south:

Tyrrhenian Sea and Solstice Sky , Credit & Copyright: Danilo Pivato

IT'S A SHORT DAY BUT A LONG NIGHT SO DRINK MOTHERFUCKER DRINK MOTHERFUCKER DRINK MOTHERFUCKER DRINK

The fixiest and most precious of our short day drinks is The Winter Solstice from Danny Meyer's book Mix Shake Stir.

Start by making rosemary-infused pear nectar:
In a jar, combine 1 1/2 cups "good-quality pear nectar such as Kern's" and 5 sprigs fresh rosemary. Cover and refrigerate for at least 12 hours or up to 2 days. Remove and discard the rosemary before using. The infused nectar will keep, covered in the refrigerator, for up to 4 days.

Still Life with Pears by Paul Cezanne

Then the cocktail:
1 1/4 oz brandy
1 3/4 oz rosemary-infused pear nectar
2/3 oz Grand Marnier or other orange liqueur
1 small sprig fresh rosemary
Fill a cocktail shaker with ice. Add the brandy, pear nectar, and Grand Marnier and shake vigorously. Strain into a chilled martini glass, garnish with the rosemary sprig, and serve.

Ahem. Yeah. Rosemary-infused pear nectar. What's onomatopoeia for *snort*? MOVING ON:

The Return of Persephone
Frederic Leighton, 1891

Janice Mansfield, a personal chef in Vancouver, BC, posted this Solstice Cocktail on her blog, Real Food Made Easy:

2 oz. Forty Creek Whiskey (Canadian whiskey)
0.5 oz. Maraschino liqueur
0.5 oz. hibiscus grenadine

0.5 oz. fresh lemon juice
2 dashes Angostura bitters
Shake with ice and double strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with 3 cherries.

She's rather symbolic about it, evoking Persephone's pomegranate seeds with the hibiscus grenadine, and the three cherries for the 3 months of winter.

And of course Martha weighs in, because there's not a holiday on the great wheel of our species' calendar that she can't somehow own:

Christ in the House of Martha and Mary
Johannes Vermeer, c. 1654-1655

1 1/2 ounces orange vodka
1/2 ounce orange-flavored liqueur, such as Cointreau
1/2 ounce freshly squeezed lemon juice, preferably from Meyer lemons
Ice cubes
Club soda, chilled
1 mint leaf, for garnish
1 raspberry, for garnish

In a cocktail shaker, combine vodka, orange liqueur, lemon juice, and ice; shake until well combined. Strain into a chilled martini glass; add a splash of soda.

Carefully fold mint leaf in half lengthwise and place the stem end into the opening of the raspberry. Float on top of cocktail and serve immediately.

Credit for Martha's cocktail goes to Charles Corpion from The Four Seasons. Aren't you glad you don't work for Martha? "Carefully fold mint leaf in half lengthwise"? Kiss me where I pee, you Type-A megalocrat.

You got all that?

I am actually feeling rather expansive and celebratory, almost like I deserve a drink myself! I ticked two things off my to-do list today - I got the teacher gifts to the teachers and I made my yearly megatrip to the post office. Oh my stars do I hate going to the post office.

The Wright Brothers would have been a nice option

Why is my post office so awful? It always has been. When my second son was born, I sent my husband to buy stamps for the birth announcements. But my lovely husband bought the wrong stamps. Instead of something with a nice flower, or breast cancer awareness, or Henry Mancini for Christ's sake, he came home with the Korean War Veterans commemorative stamp.

Now ordinarily I might have shrugged and stuck em on the envelopes anyway, but a couple of days later I just happened to be near the post office with the stamps in the car, and I figured I'd just pop in and switch them with Legends of Jazz or The Year of the Ram, something less evocative of conflict and sacrifice.

Oh my god. Oh no you won't.

The ladies at my post office looked at me as if I had suggested they sign their paychecks over to me in red lipstick, naked, when I asked to exchange the stamps. "Not without a receipt!" the lead clerk retorted, aghast, as if I might have sneakily obtained these stamps, which are after all a form of U.S. currency, at some discounted rate on some stamp black market, and was now trying to make a profit on the incremental difference by exchanging them for a set of stamps with the same face value.

Or Cesar Chavez:

¡Sí, se puede!

Which... even that doesn't make any sense.

Anyway. I wanted to burn the place down.

Next time I was in there, I had to fill out a form, take it to the counter, find out it was the wrong form, fill out the right form, and go to the back of the line to wait again, all with two children under four. You know, par for the course at the post office. I sat my older child on the counter for a minute and bent to get something out of my bag.

"You can't put him there!"
"Oh he can't reach anything. He won't be any harm."
"He could fall."
I turned to look at her. She had stopped what she was doing, holding up the line, and fixed me with an accusatory glare.
"If there was an earthquake, ma'am, he might fall. Otherwise, he's not going to just dive off the counter. He may be little, but he's not a moron."

Maybe not this one

So today, when I had to mail fourteen little packages to fourteen family members across the U.S.A., I wasn't looking forward to the How Can We Make Your Day Suck Just a Little More Squad at the P.O. I knew they were going to force me to double-tape, or black out a prior barcode, or storm out of there swearing to deliver the fucking mugs myself, even if it meant a complex compound road trip to Arizona, Buffalo, Tallahassee and Kalamazoo.

Luckily, my friend Kate reminded me of the NICE post office, the one near school, where you don't mind standing in line because the counter clerks are joking with each other and the customers, and who try to figure out the cheapest way for you to send things, and when they ask if you have liquids or perishables in your packages don't crank an eyebrow at you as if you are STUPID, like perhaps you don't know what a "liquid" is, or as if you are LYING, and in actuality, instead of sending dumb ceramic mugs with pictures of your kids on them to half the Irish-Slovak-Americans in the United States, you are really mailing a cocktail of nitroglycerin and HIV-positive blood directly to the U.S. Postmaster General.

Oh great. Now Homeland Security is going to be busting down my door. IT WAS A JOKE OKAY? I don't even know who the Postmaster General is. In fact, the only reason I think there is such a person at all is because I read The Crying of Lot 49. And I only read that because I thought it was about Biblical apocrypha. God I love that book.

So anyway. The nice lady at the NICE post office accepted my packages with nary a flinch of disapproval, weighed them and stickered them up, commented on how patient my kids were, and sent me on my way.

Which is why, Malvina at the nice Post Office - ma'am, this one's for you.

The Ray of Sunshine on a Dark Day Cocktail, by me:

1 cup pomegranate juice
1 tablespoon sugar
a piece of ginger about an inch long

When it's cold outside - I've got the month of May

Simmer the juice, sugar, and ginger gently until the mixture reduces by at least half, about 15-20 minutes. Let cool.

Shake together:
1 ounce of the stuff you just made
1 1/2 ounce golden or white rum
1 ounce lime juice
1 ounce orange juice
splash ginger liqueur
Serve in a rocks glass.

UPDATE: Ok we've spent RATHER an EVENING in the kitchen here, with special guest Laurel Snyder trying a few of our housemade schnepsls, and we've discovered an alternate, easier, oranger, more drinky drink:

The Ray of Sunshine on a Dark Day Partez Dos, by us:
2 ounces tequila
1 ounce Cointreau
1 ounce lime juice
1/2 ounce mango nectar (optional, some people kind of hate mango nectar)
hefty splash Campari
Shake with ice, serve on the rocks.

Tomorrow is going to be just a little bit brighter, but you might be just a little bit hung over. God knows we will be. So keep the rest of that pomegranate juice in the fridge for use first thing tomorrow morning. You, like Persephone, will need your antioxidants. And I've got a couple of coffee cocktails for you, to get you up and get your buzz on.

The Advil Calendar 21 Dec 2011: WEIRD DRINK WEDNESDAY ON THE DARK SIDE of BLACK HOLE CYGNUS X-1

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:30:00 +0000

All right, I was wrong. At the end of yesterday's MARATHON HANUKKAH POST I bragged that today I was going to offend the pagans. But no. The solstice is tomorrow. Today it's...

21 12 2011: A Day to Offend All Fanboys

Because, yeah, you can imagine Vader
gets pretty chapped under that helmet.

I started this month off with a trip to Target with my friend Heather. Two of Heather's six-year-old triplets (Heather has six-year-old triplets, y'all. That means that a couple of years ago she had FOUR-year-old triplets, and two years before that she had THREE TWO YEAR OLDS tearing her house a new one. Bow down, boys and girls. BOW THE FUCK DOWN.) Where was I?

Oh. When we were at Target, we picked up all kinds of Star Wars branded items as gifts for our kids. PJ's to cover the triplets' cute little heinies at night. Water bottles to keep 'em hydrated. Lip balm to unchap their tender pieholes.

You see, two of the three trips have just discovered Star Wars, and they have fallen hard. They sleep with their toy light sabers. They wake their parents at 5:30 AM with news like, "Hey mama? Hey mama? Hey! When Luke was in the cave? He was SCARED."

We must blame the patriarch in this case: Heather's husband Todd, aka the Toddfather, is something of a nerd. Giant nerd, actually. He's an N to the ERD power. Oh my gosh he's a nerd.

Of course, my sons are well versed in the politics of Empire as well, but that's my fault. My husband Bob's a different kind of nerd - he can tell you what high school just about every player on the Cleveland Browns went to. (OH MY LORD CAN HE) But he couldn't tell you what species the monster in Jabba's pit was, much less what planet it is native to. (It's a Rancor, but I don't know where it's from. Todd does. 'Cause he's a NERD.)

Nice, huh?

(Todd also is an extremely talented illustrator and graphic designer - he drew the illustrated version of the banner for another blog I am involved with, and does all the graphics for a number of businesses in the area, including Zeke's Coffee, mentioned in ~~yesterday's~~ uhhh make that this coming Thursday's post.)

(I am getting all wonged up with my days - the 25th can't come soon enough.)

(Except it better not, because after a surprise day wasted in the Baltimore City Courthouse jury room on Monday, I have yet to decorate, wrap, address cards, or do the MASSIVE post office run that I should have taken care of last week. ARG.) (And now on top of everything I have a terrible suck-ass cold.)

Anyway, that dissection of Heather and Todd's home life (sorry guys) was just an excuse for the drink that I'm about to perpetrate here. Oh man. This thing is... well even the name of it is vile. And then you get to the ingredients list:

Jabba the Hutt's Cumshot Express

1 gallon tequila
1 quart yogurt
7 cubes beef bouillion
1 stick butter
1 box Tang
Mix together with crushed ice in a glass and garnish with mint leaves

I didn't make it up, of course. Me + dairy = ewwww. Me + tequila = lock up your car keys. And this recipe is clearly a joke. It does sound like what Jabba might have been sipping while he watched that poor slave girl do the hootchie dance, but after all Jabba was a fictional character of a fictional species.

This next one, however, sounds just as terrible, and it is a drink apparently meant to be drunk by humans:

"You want to take your shirt off."

Jedi Mind Trick

1 oz. Cinnamon Schnapps
1 oz. Irish Cream
1 oz. Melon liqueur
1 splash 151 Rum
Shake with ice and strain into an ice-filled rocks or low-ball glass. Top with a float of rum

Really? Midori and Irish cream and cinnamon schnapps? I'll take the Dark Side, thanks!

But you know the real Fanboy Significance of this day - the total nerdleptic fit rippling across Facebook and on Pandora - relates to today's date. First of all, you have to do the Euro thing where the day comes first, and second, you have to be me (or possibly Todd) or definitely the curly-haired guy in that photo trying to get the hooker to take her shirt off via his awesome Jedi mind control skillz. That's Brooklyn boy Dan Fogler as Hutch in the movie Fanboys. One of Hutch's defining characteristics - and there were kind of a lot, including going as a stormtrooper on Halloween every year, an unwarranted faith that Boba Fett was truly badass, and "just the one testicle" - was that in his van, it was "Rush. All Rush, all the time. No exceptions."

So um, today is 21/12, just like the title of arguably the greatest Rush album of all time - YES I SAID IT! Yes! The rock opera 2112 in my opinion eclipses Moving Pictures, Hemispheres, even Caress of Steel and the not at all pretentious-sounding A Farewell to Kings.

Wow those are the most epically awful album names aren't they. I think the talented minds behind Spinal Tap may have been inspired by Rush when they recorded Break Like the Wind.

Maybe it was the double-neck guitars that triggered your
episode. That bass is kind of disturbing.

And I know, sure, I am well aware that there's a lot you can say about Rush. Like:

"Ooh poor me, I had a serious dysphoric episode when I was fourteen and it was triggered by the way Alex Lifeson's crotch looked in his stretch satin bellbottoms on the back cover of the 2112 album," or,
"God, there was this guy who lived in our house in DC when I was an EPA intern who listened to Rush ALL THE TIME. He never came out of his room except to walk down to the health food store to buy almond oil. We had no idea what he was doing with the almond oil, but to this day whenever I hear 'Tom Sawyer' I swear I can smell it," or
"Geddy Lee's voice causes my balls to retract into my body and I don't even have balls."

Listen, whine away... but I have a little wisdom to drop on you: they're from Ontario. Ok? The fact that they ever got out of Neil's mom's garage is worthy of admiration. Also, they are just behind the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in terms of the most consecutive gold or platinum studio albums by a rock band. I got that from Wikipedia. I think it's a lot like "most successful prog- or hair-related rock band not affiliated with a reality show with no more than three lifetime lineup changes," but any time any band can be named in the same breath as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, you must acknowledge that band.

I mean. It's not like having triplets, sure. But. Bow down. BOW DOWN I SAY. And drink a glass of really nice wine or a peaty old Scotch while you contemplate the life story of three Canadian music nerds who do nothing but play, and have played for thirty-five years. Because, as befits the elder statesmen rockstars they are, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson are the kind of rich old guys who both own serious wine cellars - and Neil takes a wee dram of The Macallan when he climbs out from behind that magnificent drum kit and revs up his motorcycle to ride to the next gig.

I think that's my brother in law Joe climbing the barrier in front of the stage at the Cleveland Agora.

TOMORROW: Drink to honor the sun's cowardly retreat from the whole holiday shebang - it's the Winter Solstice! (For real this time.)

Advil Calendar 2011 BONUS JUDAISM EDITION: Eight Nights, Eight Little Shnepsls

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:30:00 +0000

I am an atheist - a from-the-ground-up atheist, not a "I was raised Catholic and those guys are jerks, man!" atheist, although those people are no less atheists. It's just that their mental background noise includes a lot of Christian information. You can not believe in something and still be stuck with it, culturally. I mean, we kind of all are, here in the U.S., but I mean... Hoo boy. Why don't I stop. I think I just pissed off half of everyone I know.

I'm just trying to say that although I may seem to be not at all qualified to do a cocktail calendar for the eight nights of Hanukkah, the fact is, I'm barely qualified to do a Christmas one either. Maybe I should aim to be truly profoundly offensive and do a cocktail calendar for Ramadan! Think I could earn myself a fatwa?

Christ in the Eucharist by Vicente Juan Masip, 16th c.
He looks like he knows I'm not buying it.
He also looks like Chris in Marketing. Weird.

Maybe if I'd been raised in a religious sect with some actual culture, I might have taken an interest. My mother is Presbyterian, and dragged me to her church for a while when I was a kid, but Presbyterian practice is rather polite - it barely even registered as I sat in the choir loft reading a novel I'd smuggled in under the robe. I got through all the Conan books that way.

(I mean, symbolic Eucharist, please. If you're not going to go for full-on it's-a-miracle-because-I-said-so transubstantiation, why bother?)

In the interest of covering all the spiritual bases, I have done a fair amount of reading about various religions. I thought that maybe I would read something in the Koran that would inspire a belief in the unseen. Possibly the Bhagavad Gita would ring true to me.

But nope. I never found myself likely to suspend my disbelief, so as it turns out, I am a tourist in all of Jerusalem's precincts.

Because in all that reading what I learned is that I like most religions. I love the iconography and symbolism, the way that abstract concepts are communicated through story and reflected in ritual. Like I said, tourist.

I love the every-day-is-Halloween quality of Hinduism, for example. Holi, when people throw colored powder at each other, has got to be one of the most inventive ways to worship I've ever heard. And lighting little lanterns and floating them out on the water at Diwali? Adorable and contemplative at the same time!

The website of the Tulleeho Bartending Academy, Bangalore is one of my new favorite cocktail sites, for Holi cocktails like Boozy Woozy Thandai and Alcoholic Gola Sherbet.

I am sort of charmed by Catholicism in all its gory splendor - virgins! martyrs! Latin! lighting shit on fire! My husband's family had an Advent wreath with real candles which totally caught the dining room on fire one year. Plus I have always been delightedly appalled at the presumptive prurience of a religious leadership that expects its adherents to do what it says even unto where they put their dicks and how. Although I guess most religions have restrictions on dick usage.

Islam, well... the call to prayer is one of my favorite sounds in the world, I can say that at least. Whether the muezzin is flat or hoarse, croaky or nasal, when you hear his voice floating out above the city you know you're not in Kansas anymore. Beyond that - a religion that bans alcohol is sadly out of place on Your Neighborhood Librarian, at least this time of year.

But oh how I love Judaism. The food, of course. The traditions of hospitality and gratitude. The seemingly inexplicable tribal behavior - there were neighborhoods in Brooklyn in which every family drove the same model of car, every kid wore the same style of glasses, and all the moms wore tam o'shanters. Klezmer. Hebrew, which looks marvelous and sounds better, and not only uses a different script, it's backwards! And Yiddish. Love Yiddish.

I slipped a Hanukkah cocktail into last year's Advil Calendar - the Gelt Martini (Goldschlager and potato vodka) - but this year I wanted to find a whole suite of Hanukkah cocktails, one for every night.

But guess what.

Despite there being no Judaic prohibition on alcohol - in fact, taking a glass (or four) of wine is part of many observations and rituals - Jewish cocktails are as thin on the ground as Hasidim at a clambake. I have spent more time on these eight nights of the calendar than on all 24 of Advent (this year and last, I'll bet - last year was pretty thrown-together) combined.

I mean, given the absurd number of drinks associated with the Christian holiday, including cocktails incorporating flavors associated with Christmas - gingerbread martinis and candy cane coolers - as well as excruciatingly twee explicitly Christmas crap like The Drunken Elf and the Santa's Sleigh, the White Christmas and the Silent Night, one might expect at least a few Hanukkah cocktails. A Tipsy Dreidel, for instance. A Menoratini.

Come with me on my journey...

DECEMBER 20th, THE FIRST NIGHT OF HANUKKAH - JEWS DRINK FREE

Well actually, those things kind of exist. The Menorah Martini is a vodka martini with a splash of blue curacao. It's blue, get it? "Lame," I thought to myself. "Maybe if it glowed in the dark."

Which led to a brainstorm. Hanukkah is the Festival of Lights, right? When one night's worth of oil miraculously fed the temple lamps for eight nights? So the answer is...

FLAMING. SHOTS.

Haaa ha ha ha ha ha haaaa! YES. We are going to light shit on fire after all.

Ok here are the tips:

You're going to make a shot of something but only fill the shotglass 3/4 full. You'll need to float a puddle of a very high proof liquor (like Bacardi 151) on top, something that will light on fire readily. You can use a booze of a normal proof, but have it on hand at room temperature or even slightly warmed.
Do not fill the shotglass all the way up unless you don't mind the table catching on fire when you blow the shot out.
Neither must you underfill the shotglass, lest the glass crack.
You may use a snifter, but roll the liquor around the interior before you light it.
BLOW THE THING OUT BEFORE YOU DRINK IT. You are not the God of Fire. You search "flaming shots" online and you'll get far more videos of drunken daredevils lighting their faces on fire than you do drink recipes.

If you want to try that thing you saw at the engineering frat when you were in college, when they inverted the pint glass over the burning shot and then carefully maneuvered the fume-filled glass over to a buxom Alpha Phi and encouraged her to huff it... well it's called The Backdraft. The brain damage is not my fault, and the instructions are here.

And if you want to try the fancy shit with the sprinkle of cinnamon (or black pepper) that will spark in the flame, go right ahead. Apparently that is nicest with Sambuca. But DON'T do THIS:

Although if you do, send me the video.

The Flaming Doctor Pepper
6 ounces Beer
1 ounce Amaretto
1 dash 151 Proof Rum

Pour about 2/3 of a can of beer into a glass. Fill a shot glass almost full with Amaretto and use the back of a spoon to layer the Bacardi 151on top of the glass. Ignite and quickly drop the shot glass in the beer glass. Drink quickly.

Inferno
1 part Absolut Peppar
1 part Everclear, 190 proof
6 drops Tabasco sauce
1 pinch Salt
How to MIX it
Put the tabasco sauce in the bottom of a shot glass, pour equal parts Absolut Peppar and Everclear then add salt. Set on fire and serve.

Bonfire
1/2 oz Grenadine
1/2 oz Amaretto
1/2 oz 151 proof rum
How to Mix it
Layer Grenadine first, Amaretto next, and 151 on top. Light the 151 and let it warm for about 3 seconds.

12/21, THE SECOND NIGHT OF HANUKKAH: FLAMING SHOTS TURN OUT TO BE A BAD IDEA

Unless you're partial to leaving scorchmarks on the Formica or trimming your nose hairs the hard way, you have known for a long time that flaming shots are for bachelor parties and ... well pretty much just for bachelor parties. Maybe comic cons.

So let's keep looking. Next I turned to my bibles: the Official Mixer's Manual and Esquire's Handbook for Hosts. The Mixer's Manual had some possibilities: The Volga Boatman (equal parts vodka, cherry brandy and OJ) sounded ok, and the Mah Jongg (gin, rum and Cointreau) had promise (it's strong, though - those mahjongg ladies are not fucking around). But ehhh. And while the Esquire book mentions women all the time (we are fussy, myopic and clingy, except in the cartoons, where we are slutty and clueless) there is not word one about Jews.

Esquire cartoon women come to life:
Slutty Jewish Girls, photo by Flickr user Kosher Howey

Then I asked my friends. I asked a bunch of friends, but I had my hopes pinned upon Marjorie Ingall, who reviews children's books for The New York motherfuckin Times and who writes for Tablet, among other things... and Laurel Snyder, author of this year's Bigger Than a Breadbox and the Edward Eager-inspired Any Which Wall, among others. Laurel always has her antenna up about Jewish characters and themes in children's literature, and last year wrote a picture book called Baxter, the Pig who wanted to be Kosher.

Which is funny cause I'm totally writing Eat Me, The Shrimp Cocktail That Lived Forever Among the Jews.

And they didn't disappoint. Marjorie reminded me of a Tablet article she wrote about a cocktail Seder (the six Sipping Seder cocktails are wonderful) which includes a recipe by Zachary Sharaga of Louis 649 called the Mah Nishtanah (the four questions), a Negroni made with Cynar, its bitter taste evoking the bitter herbs of Passover. This is totally just what I was looking for, but for Hanukkah.

So here's what I heard back from my best Jews:

Laurel: I have heard of people making vodka martinis with a little manishevitz mixed in for flavor. I myself do not like sweet drinks, but I know people who do this.
Marjorie: i ordered a maneschevitini at a lower east side bar a few years ago and it was the most heinous thing i have ever put in my mouth. (write your own joke.) the thing is maneschevitz and slivovitz (the only two jewy starting points i can think of besides random impossible to find israeli liqueurs) are both gross!
Laurel: How about you just take a slug of scotch from a bottle in your desk drawer and call it "Zaide's Ghost."

Nobody who answered my question had anything nice to say about Kosher for Passover wine. I even found a cartoon in which the statements accompanying the four cups of wine included the addendum, "I will buy a decent Cabernet next year instead of this syrupy stuff." So on the second night of Hanukkah, we are going to go with...

Zaide's Ghost, by Laurel Snyder:

Scotch
Open bottle of scotch, raise to lips, drink. L'chaim!

Or with the Jell-O Shot recipe from the Manischewitz website (I AM NOT KIDDING):

2 cups berries (raspberry or strawberry), thaw if frozen
½ cup Manischewitz Blackberry Wine
½ cup unsweetened apple juice
1 envelop Knox gelatin
½ cup sugar
1 cup milk
2 egg whites, beaten until stiff
Purée berries in blender or put through a sieve to make fruit pulp. In mixing bowl, combine berries, Manischewitz Blackberry Wine, and apple juice. Sprinkle gelatin on top and stir until dissolved. Add sugar. Blend well. Refrigerate until jellied (about 4-6 hours).
Add milk and blend thoroughly. Fold in egg whites. Pour into 2 cake or pie pans and freeze mixture at least 6 hours.
30 minutes before serving, remove from freezer. Serve in dessert glasses.
Serves: 6.

22 DECEMBER, THE THIRD NIGHT OF HANUKKAH: HAVE A DRINK WITH DONNY "THE BEAR JEW" DONOWITZ

Eli Roth and Brad Pitt in Inglourious Basterds

Marjorie also pointed me to the Guns and Moses, a drink invented by bartender Kate Grutman for a bartending competition in L.A.

1-1/2 oz Karlsson’s Gold Vodka
3/4 oz lime juice
3/4 Maraska Maraschino
1 oz Cherry Manischewitz
Scant 1/2 tsp. rose water
Garnish with rose petal.

Maraschino, Maneschevitz, lime and vodka? I'm with Marjorie, it sounds awful. Very Jewish, but awful. We are nearly halfway through the Festival of Lights and I am still looking.

Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino's WWII movie, was kind of a wreck despite the presence of some fine (and fine looking) actors. Mostly it just made me want to watch The Dirty Dozen again. But it did give us Eli Roth as Donny Donowitz, the most prominent Jewish action hero we've seen in a while.

Lt. Aldo Raine: Actually, Werner, we're all tickled to hear you say that. Frankly, watchin' Donny beat Nazis to death is is the closest we ever get to goin' to the movies.

FOURTH NIGHT OF HANUKKAH: IF YOU WANT TO BE HAPPY YOU'VE GOT TO BE REGULAR*

Continuing my own research, I found a very nice rundown of Yiddish terms related to drinking by Michael Wex, the author of Just Say Nu: Yiddish for Every Occasion, Born to Kvetch and The Adventures of Micah Mushmelon, Boy Talmudist (which I kind of have to get my hands on). He offers these observations and one cocktail recipe:

"The single most Jewish liqueur ever known — at least back in my youth, when it was all the rage with the ladies who bar mitzvah — is Cherry Heering, a brandy-based cherry liqueur with a name that inspires confidence at any event at which Yiddish might conceivably be or have been spoken. Real cocktails, though, have never been developed. There is but one:

Alter Kaker (invented by Paul Lewis of the Joffrey Ballet)
1.5 oz. Old Grand-Dad
5 oz. Prune Juice
Pour into highball glass over ice cubes."

"Alter kaker" means "old fart" in Yiddish. I kind of love that Michael Wex didn't feel the need to translate that phrase. And I love that he appears to be personally acquainted with ballet dancers.

Our friend Sinclair reports that her grandfather, truly an alter kaker by the sound of him, was mighty fond of a 50:50 mixture of Clamato and orange juice, with vodka added. Sinclair's husband visibly dry-heaved when Sinclair mentioned this concoction - apparently the old guy got Alex to try it once. Once.

*I worked with approximately a jillion immigrants from all over the former Soviet Union when I worked for a software company in New York. We called them all "Russians" which they thought was pretty amusing. "Not only am I not a Russian," my friend Vadim would rumble, his voice deep, dark, implacable, and full of boulders - I always thought the 1919 Molasses Flood must have made a sound like Vadim reading compiler errors aloud - "but in Ukraine, I'm not even a Ukrainian - I'm a Jew!" We non-immigrants were often treated to aphorisms like the one above, usually having to do with death, but sometimes on the subject of alcohol, gambling, or bodily functions. Man, I miss those guys.

FIFTH NIGHT OF HANUKKAH: NOBODY PUTS BABY IN A CORNER

And then Marjorie found a new restaurant in Tribeca named after an old-time Catskills family resort, Kutsher's. Their drinks menu is something that I would take to bed and recite to myself as a beautiful bedtime story. It's very summery, though, befitting a restaurant named for a vacation spot, and I don't really see what's Jewish about the cocktails except some of the names. But I'll take it!

Hmm.

I like the look of the Route 17, named after the state road that shoots the motorist through Catskills resort country. I'm sure visitors to Kutsher's spent a whole lot of time on that road, and I think that's where my husband and I were one night on our way to a camping weekend on our friends' property in Delhi.

We had gotten a late start and realized that by the time we got to Chris and Jenny's it would be long past dark and camping would be a mess, so we decided to stop for the night. We saw a sign for an old-fashioned looking bungalow-style hotel thingie and pulled into the driveway. Immediately, curious faces appeared in our headlights - silent, curious faces in extremely Orthodox garb. It was a little unnerving. Actually, it was like Children of the Corn. Children of the Kasha, say.

This resort - perhaps more accurately called a compound - may have been The Derfl ("the name speaks for itself!") (it means "small village" in Yiddish) or maybe Oppenheimer's Regis Hotel ("free wifi, fully-stocked bais medrash"), but the manager made it clear that there was no room at the inn, so to speak. Not for us.

ANYway, the Route 17 has these ingredients:

tequila
orange liqueur
lemon syrup
grapefruit bitters
absinthe rinse

Instructions weren't on the website, so I winged it:
Rinse the glass with the absinthe. Then I tried 2 parts tequila and 1 part Cointreau, a thimblefull of simple syrup and a pretty heavy dash of grapefruit bitters, and a big lemon twist, which I ran around the rim of the glass before dropping in.

I had no lemon syrup, although it would be easy to make. 2 cups water, 2 cups sugar, zest of one whole lemon. Heat these things, stirring, over medium high heat, until mixture boils. Strain into a jar, throwing out the cooked zest.

VERDICT: Next time I'll skip the absinthe rinse.

SIXTH NIGHT OF HANUKKAH: DREIDEL DREIDEL DREIDEL!

Listen, I am so relieved to find an actual Hanukkah cocktail, and so exhausted by my search, here it is:

The Dreidel is much more like it:
2 ounces plum brandy
2 ounces apple juice
1/2 ounce lemon juice
1/2 ounce cherry flavored liqueur
1/2 ounce egg whites
1 dash Angostura bitters
Fill a cocktail shaker two-thirds full of ice and add all of the ingredients.
Shake very hard for 30 seconds and strain into a small wineglass.

Plum, apple, cherry - sweet but not sickly. Nice. And the egg whites are a kosher staple. Remember, when you're working with egg whites, the "shake very hard" part is key. Shake until your arm feels like it's going to come off. Shake some more. The credit for this drink goes to Nopa Bar in San Francisco.

SEVENTH NIGHT OF HANUKKAH: Presenting the House Cocktail at the Governor William J. Le Petomane Memorial Gambling Casino for the Insane*

Drank this stuff by the pint
when I was pregnant.

My friend Tracy came home from a trip to Kansas City Missouri with news of Der Schmutzige (The Dirty One), something they invented at an Austrian joint called Grünauer. All Tracy or I could get was the ingredient list - black pepper / mustard infused vodka, beet brine, pickle water and kraut juice - but I am willing to experiment until I figure out the proportions!

WIRED magazine wrote a good set of instructions for how to infuse vodka - it's one of those projects that combines the fixy aspects of craft with the sensory pleasures of cooking. (That means boys or girls could do it - oh now I'm being catty, ignore me.) Plus it's hard to fuck up.

I combined about 3 tablespoons each of multicolor peppercorns and mustard seeds (I heated the mustard seeds in a frying pan for a couple minutes first) and then added about two cups of vodka. I set this up on December 6.

That's some schmutzy damn vodka wouldn't you say?

We drank it on December 11th or so. Boy, that vodka got STRONG. I may have overdid it on the peppercorns.

I mixed:

one part infused vodka
1 part kraut juice (siphoned off a bag of kraut - they don't have Frank's down here)
1 part okra pickle brine
1/2 part beet pickle brine (I just happened to have pickled some beets this summer)

I shook these hard with ice and poured into chilled martini glasses. I took a sip. Bob took a sip. "Do you want me to take that back?" I asked him. "Please," he said.
I took them back to the kitchen and added more okra pickle brine, until the thing was possibly as much as half brine.

Then I drank them both, because Bob wasn't going to touch that shit again.

*Basically this entire 8-night post has been inspired by a long stretch of too many Mel Brooks movies. Can you have too many Mel Brooks movies, you ask? I answer with three words: Men in Tights.

12/27/2011 WEIRD DRINK WEDNESDAY HOME STRETCH EDITION

Cochineal bugs feeding on a cactus

And the last night of Hanukkah happens upon Weird Drink Wednesday. Before Marjorie and Laurel came to my rescue with their Hebetastic drink advice, I had contemplated inventing something myself in a desperate last-ditch response to the dearth of Judaic tipples.

("Judaic tipples." That sounds funny. Judaic tipples are all you get to see when you go to a striptease bar on Route 17.)

I thought of The Fuzzy Pupik, which is just a Fuzzy Navel with a kosher salt rim. Or the Parveh Manhattan - made with rye whiskey, of course. Watch out for that maraschino cherry, though - as I learned from Zushe Yosef Blech in his book Kosher Food Production (available in Google Books), some are colored with carmine, which is made from ground-up cochineal insects and therefore not kosher. Wow. A whole new reason to never eat a maraschino cherry EVER.

But this discussion wanders into Weird Drink Wednesday territory because of a drink name my husband came up with: The Klutzy Mohel.

You know what a mohel is, right? The guy who performs the bris. The circumciser. Laurel had a run-in with a real putz of a mohel when her first son was born, and I swear if I ever meet that schmuck I'm going to punch him right in the pupik.

So The Klutzy Mohel. I put my inventing hat on.

I started out thinking in terms of a clear or amber cocktail, with a drizzle of Grenadine and an evocative garnish, kind of like the Bloody Brain shot we used to do in college (right). For the garnish, I thought a wide twist of lemon peel while my husband assumed we'd use a smashed cherry. Sinclair thought something suitably disgusting could be concocted out of a button mushroom. Depends how klutzy this mohel really is, I guess.

I thought of red drinks like the cherry lime rickey. I took a side road into Kümmel territory when I happened upon the Tovarisch (vodka, Kümmel, lime) in the Mixer's Manual. There's a cocktail blogger in New Zealand who has done a lot of work with Kümmel and who kind of talked me out of it. His blog is called Bunnyhugs (don't ask) and I think he invented the clear-ish drink I want to use:

Unnamed Bunnyhugs Creation:

1 ½ oz pisco
¾ oz lemon juice
¾ oz St. Germain
½ tsp grenadine
1 tsp maraschino (the liqueur, not the juice from the potentially treyf embalmed cherries)

We haven't hit pisco yet this Advent/Hanukkah season, and it's too good to skip. You add my boyfriend St. Germain to the mix and that will make me willing to take a chance on a little bit of maraschino. We even own a bottle of Luxardo - Bob likes to put it in things (usually to the detriment of those things) because he thinks the straw-wrapped bottle is festive.

To turn Seamus's delicious pisco drink into The Klutzy Mohel:

Mix pisco, lemon juice, St. Germain and maraschino in a shaker with ice. Shakey shake. Come on Pilgrim, you know he loves you. Pour into a chilled martini glass.
Drop in - and this is my moment of genius - a fat curl of apple you have gouged out with a melon baller.
Then drizzle the Grenadine in slowly and carefully so that it does that thready bloody thing.

Et voilà!

TOMORROW: Tomorrow? Seriously? I did eight days in one post and I'm still at it tomorrow? Well of course I am! Tomorrow is the solstice, and I don't think I've pissed off the pagans yet! Tomorrow we have solstice cocktails full of pomegranate juice and champagne and all kinds of hippie crap. It's the shortest day of the year, which means it's the longest night. SKOAL, brother.

The Advil Calendar 2011 DECEMBER 19: Maple Bourbon Bacon Sexpot Edition - Bring on the pornspam

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 14:00:00 +0000

OH HELL OH HELL OH HELL

You had this awesome idea.

You were driving home from work one Friday earlier this month with the weekend stretching ahead of you and the month stretching ahead of that. You stopped at the liquor store to pick up a bottle of Goslings rum (see: December 12) and had to bring it home in a plastic bag because you were in your husband's car and he doesn't keep re-usable grocery bags in it. He keeps other things in it, of course: old issues of The Urbanite; a box of business cards from two jobs ago; 5 coffee mugs that belong in your kitchen; 3 stanky gym towels draped across the seat; two broken cell phone chargers...

And now one more plastic bag.

One more bag for the rustly ball of crinkled bags that lives in the basement stairwell and quietly mocks you every time you go downstairs to bring up a can of black beans. "ONE MORE BAG," it whispers, chuckling. "You might as well be Michael Steele."

But that's when you had your idea. You have that friend, right, the one who is resourceful and crafty but not annoying about it? Doesn't she swear by those tote bags she crochets out of plastic grocery bags? She could teach you how to make those and you could give them to people for holiday gifts! and plus! and then! you'd have chopped that rustly ball of crinkled bags to bits!

None of those bags would end up choking a sea turtle or blowing across a Sahara dune, and never again would you doubt your sanity imagining that they were laughing at you while you laundered cloth napkins instead of buying paper ones!

It was beautiful. Visions of a handmade, recycled Christmas came and went before your eyes like a tacky special effects montage. The jar of broken crayons melted down and turned into new crayons. Placemats woven out of outdated road maps. Candles for the teachers! Plastic bags for plastic bags made out of old plastic bags!

And now it's December 23rd and not only have you not finished making a single crocheted plastic tote bag (and actually it turns out? that even though you thought you could do crochet because everybody says crochet is easier than knitting and you are a sucky sucky knitter? you are a sucky sucky crocheter too); but the placemats got only as far as a blizzard of uneven paper strips that are now in a drifting Snuffleupagus pile on the dining room table; and the candlemaking project never progressed past the part where you spent $83 on molds and wicking and ate way too many Pringles.

FUUUUUCK.

And you haven't come up with anything else for the people you were going to give crafts to.

So you know what time it is, don't you? Time to bake. BAKE. BAAAKE. (That's my Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart, by the way).

Oh now shut up with your whining. By "bake" I mean make...

MAPLE BOURBON BACON JAM

And all of a sudden FUUUUUCK turns into FUCK. YEAH.

This recipe is from a Colorado food blog called Creative Culinary. I'm going to tell you right now: double all the quantities in this recipe because it makes twelve ounces of bacon spread and I know you, chica - you could eat twelve ounces of bacon spread pretty much all by yourself in one of those fits of WHY THE HELL NOT that you seem to have this time of year.

Bacon Jam by Creative Culinary:

Prep Time: 45 minutes
Cook Time: 2 hours

1 pound good quality thick cut bacon; cut into 1 inch slices
1 large onion, thinly sliced
4 tablespoons brown sugar
5 cloves of garlic, minced
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp cumin
2 teaspoons Ancho chile powder
1 cup espresso
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar (I say cider vinegar)
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/2 cup bourbon
Kosher salt and fresh cracked black pepper

In a large, heavy skillet cook the bacon over medium high heat until it’s lightly browned and just starting to crisp. Remove from heat and set aside to cool.

Add the onion and garlic and cook over medium heat until soft and translucent and starting to caramelize; 20-25 minutes. Add the spices the last 5 minutes; mix thoroughly.

While the onion cooks, chop the bacon into smaller pieces; approximately 1/2″ square.

Return the bacon to the pan and add the brown sugar, coffee, balsamic vinegar, maple syrup and bourbon. Bring to a boil and reduce to a simmer.

Simmer over low heat stirring occasionally for approximately 2 hours, until the mixture is a thick, jam-like consistency and deep rich brown color.

Let cool for 20 minutes; check and adjust seasoning with salt and pepper.

Transfer to a food processor. Pulse about 20 times to get the desired consistency. Do not process until completely smooth; it should remain a bit chunky.

Spoon into jars or storage containers and refrigerate overnight.

When I made this - and did I make this? you bet your ass I made this. Made a double batch, halved the brown sugar, doubled the chili powder, used rye instead of bourbon, and added a teaspoon of ground ginger. Took me less than three hours. Then I spread it on the entire Dillon Panthers football team and had myself A NIGHT. I sang a little song:

Also not specified in the
recipe: you may want to
skim off about a cup of fat.
What you do with it then
is your own affair.

Bacon bacon bacon jam!
Bacon jam, jam I am!
Keep your cookies keep your SPAM,
I am making bacon jam!

You, I mean, you, being slightly less depraved than I am, could put it in sweet little 4-ounce Ball jars and tie a ribbon around them and look at that! You've got your teacher gifts, your babysitter gift, the gift for your pal who taught you how to crochet even though you SUCK AT IT.

My friend Paula is thinking of making Rugelach with this stuff, and when I passed that intel on to my boys, their eyes went wide. "I need to eat that cookie," said the one. "She's going to get rich," said the other.

Either way, you'll end up with a lovely vat of indescribably sweet-savory goo. Spread it on bread, put it on sandwiches, make your bagel make its O-face. Be a hero. Who looks out for you like I do?

That is why we both deserve to collapse onto the couch with a bag of Cheetos and a bourbon. You got it out for the bacon jam anyway, right?

Here's the simplest thing to do with the bourbon. Or the rye, if you're me.

2 parts Domaine de Canton ginger liqueur
1 part bourbon
Swirl around a little. Sip straight up.

Here's the even simpler thing to do with your bourbon.

Drank it. Straight up. Stir it with a nice piece of bacon. Eat the bacon.

NEXT UP: You know the saying, "Jews don't drink?" Well it ain't true. Or, it won't be true once word of my EIGHT NIGHTS OF DRINKMAKKUH calendar hits the streets. I've got the dirtiest of dirty martinis, drinks inspired by the hot vengeful Jews of Inglourious Basterds, and excuse me did someone ask for old man drinks? Old man, you better hang on to your walker - I got shit that will iron your tallit.

The Advil Calendar 2011 December 17: HERE IT IS THE EGGNOG

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 15:35:00 +0000

S-A-TUR-DAY! NIGHT! HAVE THE IN-LAWS OVER, 'CAUSE THIS IS TOO MUCH WORK TO WASTE ON YOUR FRIENDS

Get out every whisk, eggbeater, stand mixer, hand mixer, and great big bowl that you own, because it's time to ruin your kitchen making homemade eggnog! Woo hoo!

Supermarket eggnog. NOT TONIGHT, BITCH.

That's right. And you're not going to all this trouble just to suck down a punchbowl full of dairy and raw eggs with the neighbors, who have the same exhausting working parent lives as you do and who would therefore secretly think you were unbearably precious for making eggnog from scratch when the stuff from the supermarket is... well it's... listen, it's fine.

No, this is the night to invite the boss, the potential boss, the editor of the local newspaper (ha! as if anyone pays for freelance anymore!), Sister Mary Vice Principal, or the rich auntie who might be able to chip in for Junior's tuition one day.

Last year I posted our neighbor Thelma's eggnog recipe, which, as it turned out, was also the recipe from The Joy of Cooking. This year, I have combed through my most ancient volumes to bring you three variations, each guaranteed to put you in a sugar coma. I don't drink any of them myself, being, as my son calls it, "Lacked Toast Intolerant," but every now and then I can be persuaded to get the punchbowl down from the cabinet over the fridge and whip some shit up. Why? Because if I make the eggnog, all y'all dairylappers will be so impressed that you won't ask me to do anything else for a good 24 hours.

Don't let the sweet smile fool you. Avalynne Tawes is about to do unspeakable things to those turtles.

The Governor's Lady would never do this: it's cheating.
She might serve those ham salad cones though.

Mrs. J. Millard Tawes (First Lady of Maryland, 1959 to 1967) wrote a cookbook once. She called it My Favorite Maryland Recipes, and her byline included not only her name, but, in parentheses after it, "The Governor's Lady." As if maybe "First Lady" was too assertive, and "Governor's Wife" too unassuming? Beats me. Maybe I'll start billing myself as "The Education Consultant's Lady."

There's an annual clambake in Crisfield in the Tawes's honor, and if it weren't in July, I'm sure they would serve Mrs. Tawes's eggnog:

8 eggs, separated
10 heaping tablespoons sugar
2 quarts milk
1/3 of a fifth each of blended whiskey, Puerto Rican rum, brandy
1 pint whipping cream
pinch salt
nutmeg
Beat egg yolks until very light. Add sugar and beat again. Add milk slowly. Add spirits very slowly, stirring constantly. Fold in whipped cream. Beat egg whites with salt and fold in. Sprinkle with nutmeg. Chill.

Put your arm on ice.

River Road Recipes is something I picked up down South. A publication of the Junior League of Baton Rouge, it was first copyright in 1959, and I was given a copy in 1989. On a business trip to the Big Red Stick, I mentioned to my client's wife, who was an actual member of the Junior League, that while I was in her fair city I was looking forward to eating red beans and rice. WRONG. She got this look on her face like she'd just eaten a mothball. It was as if I'd met the mayor of Bangkok and I'd said, "So mayor, I guess you go to a lot of donkey shows." Yup, there's no snob like a Southern snob.

Naturally, the very next day her husband brought in a copy of this book, gift wrapped and with a lovely, acidly polite note from the wife. In it I found recipes for cakes with seven layers and two kinds of frosting, Beef Wellington, composed salads, and the like. NOT red beans and rice. I wish I could thank the permafrosted old biddy, though - I love this book. One recipe in the section "How Men Cook" starts out "This is for a dug out pit, preferably brick lined to retain heat. Start fire about 9PM the night before." Not exactly "Stand facing the stove," right?

Here's a make-ahead eggnog from River Road Recipes:

You do have a silver nutmeg shaker right?

Make one week before serving:
4 eggs, separated
3/4 pint brandy
6 tablespoons rum
1 quart cream
3/4 cup granulated sugar
nutmeg
Beat egg yolks. Add brandy and rum gradually (1 tablespoon at a time), while beating constantly. Add 1 pint of unwhipped cream and the well-beaten egg whites. Continue beating and add sugar and another pint of unwhipped cream. Sprinkle with nutmeg to taste. Bottle and store in outside temperature (the window ledge is a good place). Do not refrigerate. Shake in bottle before serving. Serves 10-12.

Now that is just weird. In Baton Rouge, they're storing uncooked eggs and dairy... outside? Ok...

Charleston Receipts, originally published in 1950, is another treasure I accumulated on a trip down south. Amid recipes for scuppernong wine and some stuff called ratafia that is made from peach kernels and so I suppose must taste like Laetrile, there are three versions of eggnog. I'm copying the Cotton Hall Plantation Eggnog, because it makes 90 to 100 servings, and one of these days you just might need to get that many people hammered.

5 dozen eggs
4 cups granulated sugar
1 1/2 quarts whipping cream
1 pint coffee cream
1 1/2 quarts rye whiskey
1 pint rum
1/2 teaspoon salt
Beat egg yolks with sugar; add liquor, then whites of eggs beaten very stiff, and salt. Whip cream and add last.

You know who else likes eggnog? That Snoopy Dog fellow, apparently.
What's he doing with that candy cane? He's some kind of flute player?
Maybe he can tell us where to find a nice donkey show.

The Advil Calendar, DAY 16: YOU'RE A MEAN DRUNK, MR GRINCH

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:18:00 +0000

(There was also a cat named Grundoon)

DECEMBER 16
Ok when I was a kid I had this father who was unremittingly, automatically iconoclastic. If there was a grain, he would go against it. If you provided a beat, he would march to something else. When he was in the Air Force, he got around the base via pogo stick. He conflated J.R.R. Tolkein and Herbert Hoover, offering "A Balrog in every woodpile!" Named one cat Eleanor, after Mrs. Roosevelt, because he claimed she was an unattractive cat, and another Virgil, after the poet, for no reason at all. He was incapable of doing something so predictable as reading us a picture book, so he would start with the copyright information in the front and feign outrage when we complained: "You asked me to read the book, I'm reading the book!" I still have that father, but I mostly ignore him nowadays and mostly he only trots that malarkey out for my kids.

The distelfink is the bird one

Which is kind of good, because otherwise they might not believe me when I complain about my youth.

To wit:

Some of my dad's most enduring iconospasms have to do with Christmas. Every year, he insisted that he was going to stuff barbed wire up the chimney so that our house would not be invaded by "that fat housebreaker" on Christmas Eve. He sang "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Ginklefink," I think inspired by the Pennsylvania Dutch distelfink, a hex sign you'll see on barns all through Lancaster County, where we frequently took long, punishingly embarrassing weekend bike rides with the Baltimore Bicycle Club. We rode ten-speed tandems and wore long knit bike shorts - this was the late 70's, when even basketball players wore hotpants - and we were possibly the first family in North America to use protective headgear to ride a bike. They didn't make bicycle helmets small enough for my brother and I, so the two of us wore rock climbing helmets. And homemade rear view mirrors that fastened to our glasses.

Let me tell you something. When the Amish come out of their houses to point at you and murmur to each other behind their hands, you may be certain that you are dressed funny.

So, for Dad, our Friday Night Drink is...

The Grinch

2 ounces of Midori liqueur
1 ounce vodka
1/2 ounce of fresh lemon juice
1 tsp. of simple syrup
Pour the ingredients into a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake well and strained into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a maraschino cherry.

Some people recommend a crushed peppermint stick rim, but that would make me (and my dad) barf.

I think he will be pleased, although he would never tell. He would also never drink this. Midori? No way. He's an amber liquid man (and by the way, not a mean drunk - that title was just too cute to pass up).

There is an alternate version of this drink, developed by one of those people who make gels and foams out of food and then expect people to eat them. It involves calcium lactate and sodium alginate and I have to admit, my science geek side (also inherited from my father) would love to try this. I'm not going to copy the recipe - if you think you might like to put on your lab coat and wield a pipette in the kitchen (not kidding about the pipette), you're gonna have to gas up the Nerdmobile and go there yourself.

Speaking of nerding out: tomorrow is Eggnog Saturday, and I have gone Extra Original Authentic with the research for this one. Take your Lactaid and clear the decks - it's gonna get thick and whipped around here.

The Advil Calendar, Week Three, Day One: This Time It's Seasonal

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:00:00 +0000

IT'S THE FIFTEENTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS AND DID YOU EVER THINK YOU WERE GOING TO MAKE IT THIS FAR?

Artsy fartsy mug from ABC, only 75 bucks. Apiece.

No? Well you have. Welcome to the third Thursday of Advent, also known as Saint ABC Carpet and Home Day, because at this point you are just going to stop in there after work and GET SOMETHING for that bitch sister-in-law who now says she has "way too many" umbrellas so you had to take the one you bought for her back to the museum gift shop... because COME ON, there is literally something for everyone at ABC as long as you don't mind paying at least fifteen times more than it's worth.

(In other cities you're going to have to substitute Pier One. Suck it up, I live in Baltimore now and I've gotten used to it, you can too.) (On the bright side, much cheaper.).*

And after you have closed your eyes and paid waaaay too much for a throw pillow or some letterpress stationery, you are going around the corner to the Old Town and salvage your pride by ordering something dignified yet gutsy, and classy too. Thursday is New Yorkers' Night Out, after all. Stay for two.

Dolores del Rio and friends salute your shopping acumen

I'm going to suggest the aromatic, cultured Dolores Cocktail. The Dubonnet is light and a little sweet, and the rum and sherry are complex and rich.

2 parts aged rum (my beloved Flor de Cana is wonderful in this but any will do)
2 parts Dubonnet Rouge
1 part fino sherry
Stir vigorously with ice, strain into a chilled cocktail glass, garnish with a lemon twist.

Or if you're me, you'll maybe also want to try the Dubonnet Negroni, equal parts gin, Campari, and Dubonnet Blanc, garnished with a lemon twist. If you can find a guy in a fancy gaucho outfit to hang out with at the bar, you are WAY ahead.

A note about that fino sherry in the Dolores: what you'll find at the Old Town will no doubt be Tio Pepe, which is fine. But fino sherry is white and fresh, and if you buy your own bottle, it should be kept in the fridge with the vermouth and other wine-based spirits.

*I am kidding about Pier One. This year more than others, you will really help your fellow citizens by shopping as locally as you can. Here are some Baltimore alternatives to popular online or chain stores - try to find the same kind of analogues in your town:

Necklace made from vintage tin at Studio C

Etsy - Studio C Jewelry and Gifts, 4337 Harford Road in Lauraville
Urban Outfitters - Trixie's Palace, 1704 Thames Street in Fells Point
Anthropologie - Myrtle Dove, 5006 Lawndale Avenue, Roland Park
Design Within Reach - Home Anthology, 91 Mellor Avenue in Catonsville
West Elm - In Watermelon Sugar, corner of Chestnut and 36th Street in Hampden
Pottery Barn - Su Casa, 901 S Bond Street in Fells Point
Starbucks - Zeke's Coffee, 4607 Harford Road in Lauraville
LUSH or Bath and Body Shop - SoBotanical, 14 E West St in Federal Hill
Thinkgeek - Shananigans, 5004 Lawndale Ave. in Roland Park
Toys R Us - Mumbles and Squeaks, 8133 Main St. in Ellicott City
Lillian Vernon - The Toy Chest, 1809 Reisterstown Road, Suite 150 in Pikesville
Gymboree - Urban Baby Runway, 3608 Falls Road, Hampden
Amazon or BN - Atomic Pop (Hampden), The Ivy (6080 Falls Road, Roland Park), Children's Book Store (Roland Park), Red Canoe (Lauraville)
Ritz Camera - Service Photo, Hampden

TOMORROW: Fire up the DVD player and relax with the Whos down in Whoville and a drink inspired by the meanest of mean old men. (Hint: it's not the Grinch.)

The Advil Calendar, 2011: WEIRD DRINK WEDNESDAY HORROR EDITION

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 14:43:00 +0000

WEDNESDAY THE WHAT?TEENTH
Ok here's what happened. I lost count of days, or I never counted up to begin with, or something, and I wrote this whole day thinking that Wednesday was the 13th. So... we're just going to pretend that it is.

Humde dum.

OMG Weird Drink Wednesday falls on the 13th of the month???!?!! We're all gonna diiiie!!!

*cough*

It's ok, don't get up, I'll get you a beer. No no, it's no trouble.

Now that that's over with, we might as well embrace the mayhem, the bad luck, the lurking horror. We ought to just shake hands with the nightmares of the season, so that when they crash down on us through the suspended ceiling of our self-deluded holiday hopes we will at least be among friends: the mechanic on the phone explaining that what you thought was a slipped belt is in fact a blown transmission. The friendly neighbor asking "Has your chimney always leaned like that?" The first trimester progress report (what used to be called a report card). The work email that includes the phrase, "due to these economically straitened times..." Passive-aggressive stepmothers. Passive-passive husbands. And a holiday to-do list as long as Tim Riggins's... well, it's long.

Given all that, here's a cocktail inspired by Jason, the Friday the 13th serial killer of our youth. Bet you weren't expecting that - nobody every expects Jason, although after like seventeen movies in which he just keeps coming back, you'd think we'd all be expecting Jason whenever we like stepped into a fitting room at Nordstrom or parked in the garage or went swimming.

The Crystal Lake Surprise (something horrible is is floating in it!)

2 measures of white rum
1/4 measure of blue curaçao
1 measure of orange juice
1/2 measure of lime juice
1 packet of red Jell-O
Vodka (optional)

Make the Jell-O. Add vodka (if desired) and set it in the freezer.
Just before the Jell-O sets, sir it up with a hand whisk.
Let it set for at least 5 minutes.
Mix (shake) the rum, blue curaçao and juices with a cocktail shaker over ice.
Strain mixture into a chilled cocktail glass.
Spoon the surprise into the cocktail. It should now float ominously in the water like the body of little Jason Voorhees!

I copied this recipe hook line and sinker from a terrific post by a creative and strong-willed (and strong-livered) Halloween-obsessed blogger in the UK. I could not resist the combination of a floating Jell-O shot and a Friday the 13th reference - it's just like high school! Except I didn't drink in high school and I was afraid of horror movies.

It's entirely possible that this would be rather a nice drink without the floating viscera - the curaçao is going to make it a little sweet but I think with a dust of red pepper I would totally try this.

Next week: look for cocktails inspired by favorite movie characters, crotchsnickety family members, and finally - finally, Cheryl! - I'll post an eggnog recipe. Or three.

The Advil Calendar 2011, Tuesday December 13: Drink Locally, Act Foolishly

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 14:00:00 +0000

DATELINE: DECEMBER 13

It's Taco Tuesday at Clementine, a high-quality, low-key restaurant here in Northeast Baltimore, and that's all the reason I need to proclaim Tuesdays on our calendar of slightly sloshed jetfueled merriment Local Tuesday.

Clementine's chef/owner Winston Blick has a thing for making and growing stuff himself, so the main dining room at Clementine features a view into the cold room (it's the blue room under the star in the photo above) so that diners can gaze at his cured meats (not a euphemism) and giant jars of pickles (not a euphemism) and coils of homemade sausages (still not talking about anybody's penis) as they enjoy the restaurant's smoked bluefish cakes or duck nachos or bacon-wrapped meatloaf and DAMN my stomach just made the most appalling noise. Oh wait that was the cat.

(It must be noted: how disgusting is my cat if, asleep on the couch beside me, she is capable of making a noise that I could mistake for human peristalsis? Very disgusting, is the answer. Why couldn't she be more like the real Buzz Aldrin?)

So I'd say this is exactly the right day to go ultra-local with our cocktail. Even though Clementine invents amazing drinks that are well worth going out of your way for (I like the Tequila Fresca and the Asian Pear), most of them involve Winston's homemade bitters, syrups or infused liqueurs, the recipes for all of which are closely guarded secrets (probably not, but I've never asked) so you'll just have to make a reservation. Tell them the pink haired librarian sent ya! I always wanted to say that.

This spicy delicious tequila cocktail, however, comes from right across the street. Take it away, Chris:

Jalapeño Cucumber Margarita, by Christine

This recipe’s origin, as far as I can tell, is a bar called Lonesome Dove, in Fort Worth. I lifted the recipe from the interwebs.

For four drinks:

8 slices jalapeño

8 slices cuke

¼ cup sugar

8 ounces orange-flavored liqueur or orange juice

10 ounces silver tequila

juice of 2 limes

ice

salt (preferably kosher)

Use a mortar and pestle to mash up the jalapeño and cuke and sugar together. Put the mess into a cocktail shaker. Add tequila, orange, lime, ice, and shake. Pour into a salted-rim glass, and garnish with slices of the pepper (or cuke or lime, I suppose, but why not the pepper?).

NOTES:

The jalapeño. Seed or de-seed the slices, depending on how much heat you like. Personally, I think the drink needs some seeds.

The orange. What I like best in this drink is fresh-squeezed orange juice, which takes the cocktail to 11. But boxed OJ is fine, and if you use the liqueur, you might as well use a cheap triple sec, since it’s a pretty penny cheaper than Cointreau, and also cheaper than Grand Marnier, which, I believe, is cognac-based, and you can’t really taste the difference much. The cheap stuff is probably sweeter, so keep that in mind for your hangover.

The lime. For the love of god, use fresh lime juice. If you make it with the bottled stuff, you are not allowed to say you got the recipe from me.

This is why I party with my neighbors. Standards, dammit. One has to draw the line somewhere. Thank you Chris, and stay tuned tomorrow for Weird Drink Wednesday!

The Advil Calendar 2011: BAD MOMS SAY 'NO' TO XMAS MUSIC AT THE BAR (and yes to cranberry drinks)

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:30:00 +0000

12.12.11, or if you're feeling Continental, 12.12.11
It's Monday night, my girls' night, and here's a recipe from one of my favorite girls:

Cranberry Cobbler, by Jim Meehan of PDT, as featured on GOOP, Gwyneth Paltrow's online lifestyle dogma thing

Just kidding again. Although she seems to have a decent sense of humor and could therefore hang with us on Monday night, Gwyneth Paltrow persists in trying to make people believe she can sing, and she can't, and that is the worst.

1 orange wheel
1 lemon wedge
½ ounce Cranberry Simple Syrup (see recipe below)
2 ounces Beefeater Gin
¾ ounce Lustau East India Sherry
4 macerated cranberries (from Cranberry Simple Syrup)
mint sprig
Muddle the orange, lemon and syrup in the bottom of a shaker. Add the gin, sherry and a handful of ice. Shake and strain into a rocks glass filled with ice. Garnish with the cranberries and mint.
(Jim Meehan/Michael Madrusan, 2007)

Cranberry Simple Syrup
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
1 bag of fresh or frozen cranberries
3 ounces Beefeater Gin
Bring the sugar and water to a boil in a saucepan set over high heat. Add the cranberries and cook over medium heat until the cranberries start to split. Remove from the heat, stir in the gin and cool. This mixture can stay in the fridge for a couple of weeks. When you’re ready to use it, strain the syrup, reserving the cranberries for garnish.

Okay the whole bit about you have to make your own cranberry simple syrup - that is not as nose-in-the-air as it sounds. Making simple syrup is ridiculously easy and it keeps a long long time.The fact that you can use frozen cranberries, oh hell, that makes it a no-brainer, and this cocktail sounds really good.

People like Michelle Obama eat at Gramercy Tavern.

I found another cranberry cocktail in Mix Shake Stir, a book of cocktail recipes from the Danny Meyer restaurants in NYC. He has like ten, including Union Square Cafe, Shake Shack, and the Modern. As you might expect, the cocktails in the book are a little precious, a little hyper-artisanal, with ingredients like lavender honey and cardamom bitters, but weirdly, his bartenders apparently don't know from hot sauce, calling for Texas Pete in one recipe and Tabasco in at least one other. Tabasco. What is that, supposed to be ironic? Post-gourmet?

I mean, I can see not using Sriracha, the foodie go-to hot sauce also known as rooster sauce, in cocktails (except Bloody Marys) - sriracha is so good because it is made from ground fresh peppers with a minimum of liquid, so it has a thick consistency that would settle in a less-dense liquid - and not everybody can make their own, although I know plenty of restauranteurs who do (WINSTON) (and if you are making your own rhubarb syrup then for crap sake why aren't you making your own hot sauce?) but there are many great hot sauces out there that are thin like Tabasco but don't taste like spicy industrial vinegar. Louisiana The Perfect is the one that comes to mind. Even Crystal.

ANYWAY, I never think there are enough winter rum drinks, so I like the sound of this:

Winter Mojito

2 tsp Drunken Cranberries (recipe follows) plus 2 tsp of their liquid
2 lime wedges
8 sprigs fresh mint
2 1/2 oz dark rum (they like Gosling's and I'm fine with that)
soda water to taste
Muddle 1 tsp of the drunken cranberries and the 2 tsp of liquid, the lime wedges, and the mint sprigs in a cocktail shaker. Add the rum and some crushed ice and shake that thing. Strain into a chilled rocks glass and top with soda water. Garnish with more mint and the rest of the cranberries.

Drunken Cranberries

1 1/2 cups simple syrup
2 cinnamon sticks
zest from one large orange
1 cup cranberries
1 1/2 cups white rum
In a large saucepan, combine the simple syrup, cinnamon sticks, and the orange zest. Bring just to a boil over medium high heat and add the cranberries. Cook until the cranberries just begin to pop and their skins begin to split, about a minute.
Remove from the heat and lest cool slightly, then strain the liquid into a large glass jar. Add the cranberries to the jar, discarding the cinnamon and orange zest, then add the rum.
Let cool, then cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours or up to 3 weeks.

Dude, I would use that in all kinds of stuff. I would add it to hot cider, I'd put it in my tea, hell I'd stir a spoonful of that into my oatmeal in the morning, get my holiday day off to a more satisfying start. Wouldn't you?

The Advil Calendar 2011: 12/11/11: Sunday Bloody Sunday Edition

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 14:00:00 +0000

You woke up with a hangover because of that punch, didn't you, even though it was totally devoid of artificially flavors or fortified sugar syrups. Hm. You must have had kind of a lot of punch. Feeling a little sticky? This will help.

ON THE ELEVENTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS:

That's right. Tim Riggins with his shirt off for almost an entire movie. Still hasn't washed his hair though I see. And here's a Martian cocktail to go with:

Angry Red Planet, from Atomic Cocktails

Coarse salt
1/4 t grated fresh ginger
1/2 t wasabi or prepared horseradish
1/2 t minced garlic
4 dashes soy sauce
1 T fresh lemon juice
fresh-cracked pepper to taste
2 oz. pepper vodka
3 oz. tomato juice
1 t fresh lime juice
1 lime wedge for garnish
Salt the rim of a highball glass and chill the glass.
Combine the ginger, wasabi, garlic, soy sauce, lemon juice, and pepper in a bowl and muddle into a paste. Stir in the vodka. Pour the mixture into a large mixing glass along with the tomato juice and lime juice.
Fill the chilled glass with ice and add the vodka mixture.
Garnish with the lime wedge.

And you know what will really help? If I send my houseboy over there to make it for you because Jesus Christ that's a lot of work. Atomic Cocktails is one of those books that came out ten years ago when people were all of a sudden like OH HAI COCKTAILS HOW RETREAUX. The books featured kitschy design and overbuilt drinks with overcute names. Also, they were written prior to The Great Hipster Rediscovery of Traditional Spirits, which I think dates to about 2004 (2001 in NYC), and so the drinks in them are destitute of flavorful, pungent items like Aperol and Cynar.

But listen: if you want a Bloody Mary, this will do just fine:

1 1/2 oz vodka
3 oz tomato juice
2 dashes Worcestershire sauce
juice of half a lemon
dash of salt
ground pepper
Shake it all up, strain into a wineglass. Garnish with lemon and a dusting of pepper if desired.

That is a perfectly proportioned Bloody Mary, by Bix Biederbeck, from his restaurant in San Francisco. He put out a book called Bixology, a petite, hand-sized item which looks like a pocket mixer's manual from the 1930's but which is in fact more like a midget Book of Lists, with quotes, little food recipes, Phascinating Phacts, glossaries and the like.

And unless you need to be reminded of Dorothy Parker's thoughts on cocktails ("Two and I'm under the table, three and I'm under" blah blah "the host" yeah we know Dottie you're such a SLUUUUT) (This has never occured to me before, but she was like the first female shock comic, the Sarah Silverman of her day) (Sarah Silverman, if you're reading this, don't let it go to your head. The reverse is not true)... um anyway, my point is that although the very few drink recipes in Bixology are indeed fine and often devastatingly simple, you can easily find them elsewhere.

Rest up drinkers, because tomorrow's Monday and Gwyneth Paltrow is going to show us how to make a drink.

The Advil Calendar 2011: December ten ten Ten TEN FOR EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVERYTHING (i.e. punch)

noreply@blogger.com (YNL) — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Is a Saturday night, and YOU might be having a party. Or you might be going to a party, like my friend Dances With Chickens, who will be attending the Drink Until You Love the Baby Jesus Party tonight (is that not the best holiday party name you've ever heard?). Dances With Chickens is currently incadrinkitated (knocked up), but that doesn't mean she is not gonna take something.

I like taking a pitcher of some kind of punch to parties - it doesn't have to be kept warm, it is always welcome, you can give it a funny name (Punch of Ages, The Punch Heard Round the World, 83-Year-Old Astronaut Punch), and if you forget to bring the container home, well you can probably live without that pitcher until the next time you see your host. So. Just in case you were thinking about entering the throwing or going fray:

DECEMBER 10th: DO's and DON'Ts of PUNCH

DO: make your punch beforehand.
DON'T: bust out the fine table linens.

Here's what I've found after reading about a hundred punch recipes: punch is terrible stuff. It always creeps right the hell up on you because you've just been ladling it into a plastic cup all afternoon and too late you realize you don't have the least idea what's in it or how much of it you've drunk.

At best, it might include a high-fructose corn syrup mixer, which - you may not know this - can be a major contributor to the kind of hangover that'll make you start re-evaluating your every life choice.

And at worst, that festive bucket of grog will contain Everclear, which you know can be a major contributor to the kind of hangover that'll make you start re-evaluating your every life choice. Hell, given enough grain alcohol, you might be on your way to a little re-evaluation before the party's even over.

More useful information, right? I live to serve.

I thought about inserting a picture of Mel Gibson (DON'T: grow up to be an adulterous misogynistic drunk penis) or Woody Allen (DON'T: marry your stepdaughter) or Charlie Sheen (DON'T: speak) here as examples of people who probably had too much punch and then started making really dumb life choices, but nobody needs to see that. Instead, I offer my cat's namesake, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, stone cold sober, socking the hell out a some twerp conspiracy theorist who called him a liar and a coward to his face. Guess whose face got the worst of the bargain.

DON'T: invite disrespectful conspiracy theorist
dickheads to your party.
DO: invite Buzz Aldrin.

You wouldn't believe some of these punch recipes, by the way. In addition to calling for truly staggering amounts of liquor - gallons, in some cases - they'll also ask for a whole lot of strong tea, fortified wine, or, often as not, an entire bottle of peach brandy.

Additional advice: avoid peach brandy. It will make Buzz Aldrin want to punch you in the face.

The recipe I picked - well, you're going to think I picked it for the name... and you'd be right. Seriously? Nuremburg? Oh hell yeah, just thinking of that place makes me want to party! But it turns out I am very interested in this punch's main ingredient, arrack.

There's ne'er a villain dwelling in all Denmark, but he's an arrack knave! (DON'T: quote Shakespeare at your party, or in fact under any circumstances. And if you do quote Shakespeare, DON'T quote Hamlet.)

"Arrack" is a word that covers a variety of fermented liquors from Asia and the Middle East. If arrack is from Sri Lanka, it is from the unopened flower of the coconut palm. If it's from Indonesia, it's distilled from sugar cane. If it's from the Philippines, it's also coconut based, but from a different process.

NUREMBERG PUNCH. (For a party of 15)
Take 3/4 of a pound of loaf sugar; squeeze upon it, through muslin, the juice of two or more good- sized oranges; add a little of the peels cut very thin, pour upon a quart of boiling water, the third part of that quantity of Batavia Arrack, and a bottle of hot, but not boiling, Red or White French Wine -- Red is best.
Stir together. This is excellent when cold, and will improve with age.

Because of the age of this recipe - it's from The Savoy Cocktail Book - I suspect that it's Batavia arrack (the sugar cane kind, from Indonesia) that we're looking for here. Also because I cannot imagine coconut and red wine together being anything decent at all. And you want to kind of mash the orange peels into the sugar to release as much of the oil as possible.

I think I might make this as the hot wine punch we serve at our annual Pig Roast on New Year's Day. Two years ago I got my friend Segrid to lend me her ancient family recipe for glögg, and holy shit that stuff was a spicy delicious eight-ball of intoxication. Luckily, I wasn't carving the pig that year. I need allll my fingers.

Can't find arrack? Prefer a more theatrical display? I gotcha covered. Enter Feuerzangenbowle, the "fire-tongs punch." Buckle up, ladies and gents.

2-3 bottles of dry red wine

2 cups amber or dark rum (at least 54% alcohol, 80% would be better)
2 oranges
1 cinnamon stick
5 cloves
1 "Zuckerhut" ("sugar hat")
dash of ground ginger
(optional) 2 lemons

NOTES: If you can't find loaf sugar in the baking aisle, you could use 1/2 lb of sugar cubes, or the Mexican brown sugar that comes in cones or pucks.

This thing is traditionally made with a "Feuerzange," some kind of fondue pot sounding thing, but I didn't have one on hand, so the following instructions incorporate my mittelamerikanische improvisations:

Put the wine into a stock pot and heat it slowly.

Wash the fruit with hot water, peel in thin strips.
Now put the zests, spices and juice in the bowl.
Place a wire screen spatter guard over the stock pot and put the loaf sugar on it. You could also use a wire strainer if you have one big enough.
Pour a ladlefull of rum onto the sugar, allowing it to soak in. Then carefully light it.
When the flame on the sugar has stopped burning, repeat the process with a fresh ladle of rum. Add the rum very slowly this time or you will burn your hand.
When the sugar has completely dissolved, remove the screen and add another ladle of unburnt rum to the bowl.
Remove the drowned citrus and spices, and ladle into cups.

Party hard but party safely tonight. I leave you with this, because it's really a party once The Nuge shows up: