Your Turn, Ladies

Let’s face it, speaking from experience, I can say it’s good to be a Man.
One of the great things about being a guy is in the field of indulging yourself in Badassery. Our popular culture is awash in badass guys, and our country is equally awash in businesses who want to let regular guys get in on the fun.
Whether it is flying a Russian MiG fighter, attending baseball fantasy camps, manning the rigging in a Tall Ship, or these friggin’ idiots, the world is filled with opportunities for men to indulge their self-image.
Even real life superstars give it a shot, as with the program where the Navy SEALs drag off our top Olympic swimmers and give them a look at what REAL training in the water is like. (Actually, they don’t. The Olympians can’t take what the SEALs dish out to real trainees.)

But when women want to lay out money for recreational escape, what is mostly on offer? Culinary camp? The spa? Pottery weekends?

In case you haven’t noticed, popular culture is increasingly embracing the concept of the female badass.

Miss Romanoff doesn’t do cupcake class.

Enter Femme Fatale Finishing School in Central Ohio. Femme Fatale is your one-stop shop for a taste of all the best aspects of being an International Woman of Mystery. What’s great about being Jane Bond? Shooting guns for a start. They have that covered. Hand to hand combat. Check. Skilled gambling, car chases, and the art of seduction? Check, check, and check. And of course, neither self-image nor public persona is complete without knowing to the core how to drink a cocktail better than everyone around you.

Femme Fatale Finishing School is owned Peg McCort, a mother, businesswoman, and fitness enthusiast, and Jason Holt, a personal trainer and Krav Maga instructor. Together, they had an idea for a series of experiences for women looking for ways to be more adventurous, exciting, and assertive without sacrificing any femininity. Over the year they spent developing the concept, it grew into the metaphor they now use. The name really says it all.

FFFS doesn’t do “classes”, they offer “Missions”. The names of these Missions, such as Loaded Guns, tell as much about the attitude as they do the subject matter.

Combat Ready, for instance, embodies in its name the difference from more prosaic offerings such as How Not to be a Victim, or simply Self-Defense. The kind of training Combat Ready introduces participants to has a more assertive mind-set than, “just kick him in the knee and run away classes,” as Peg describes them. Combat Ready is more about the concept of taking the gun or knife away as a means of ending the conversation.

Not that a session of Combat Ready is going to give a woman the ability to safely do that. The point is to show participants that it is possible, that learning to actually do it can be fun, and give them the contacts to pursue these skills in the future. Most of FFFS’s missions are like this. The Missions are about having fun and expanding the horizons of what you can do. The advantage over things like Fantasy Baseball Camp is that the activities Femme Fatale introduces are one that real people can actually participate in and use when the adventure is done.

Their two biggest mission specialties so far are Loaded Guns and Seduce.

Loaded Guns 1 and 2 are firearms experiences. Loaded Guns 1 is an introduction to guns, primarily aimed at women who either have never touched a gun or otherwise feel uncomfortable around them. It starts with range and safety instruction at Black Wing Shooting Center (they are negotiating adding other venues in the area), then an extended period out in the range, shooting with handguns. They start with .22s and eventually work all participants up to 9mms and .45s. They finish up with more discussion and a light party.

Personally, I’m a big believer that adults, and even most older kids, should at least be familiar with firearms, know their real safety issues, and simply have some experience with what happens when a gun goes off nearby. Peg talks eloquently about the therapeutic and empowering value shooting a firearm for the first time can have for women. For some women, just doing it once will be enough to scratch the itch, others may find it to be a great pastime and go on to try recreational shooting, or even take a concealed carry class. (I intend to take a concealed carry class myself for the legal, safety, and skills training. I doubt I’ll actually carry.)
For many, it is simply a fear to eradicate forever. Jason told me, “we have lots of women come in who are scared to death when they walk out on the range and we put a gun in their hands for the first time. I had one lady who was literally in tears at being expected to fire a little .22. but by the end of the session, we practically had to pry the .45 out of her hand. She wouldn’t even swap back to the .22.”

This brings up something important about what they are doing with FFFS. When men do an adventure experience, we have ways of psyching each other up to get on that animal, or jump off that thing… ways that are neither pleasant nor particularly effective with normal women. These folks work very hard and very carefully to recognize the different motivational techniques you need to not only succeed and but make it fun for female clients to take that leap. Whatever the leap may be.

Loaded Guns 2 is more pure adventure for women who have already experienced the introduction. It gives them the chance to experience firing serious weapons such as assault rifles, carbines and a machine gun or two, I believe.

At the other end of the spectrum, but just as Bondian a skill if you think about it, is FFFS’s other most popular series of missions, Seduce. Seduce is about learning to control and enhance your sensuality through movement and dance. They start out with just how to walk and move on to a variety of dance ideas. Yes, they include an introduction to dancing with a pole, but Peg goes to pains to explain that they are not teaching stripping, or the kind of dancing strippers do. It’s about asserting your femininity. To me, it’s about a perfectly acceptable way to keep one’s rightful share of power in a relationship. And it certainly fits with the spy movie-esque theme of the business. If 007 didn’t know how to Seduce a variety of women, he’d have been in an unmarked grave a long time ago!

While most Femme Fatal Finishing School Missions are just a couple of hours, they are beginning to do some longer, more involved events as well. A great example is the upcoming Ride the Edge special mission. Held at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, one of those tracks where the Indy cars get to turn right every so often, this full day mission will involve training the women on spin-outs, evasive driving, pursuit driving, and a high-speed run. Oh, and there also will be the opportunity to drive around the track at speed, shooting pistols out the window of the moving cars at targets by the side of the track….

Tom Cruise not included.

Will someone tell me why the hell this company only allows female customers?

At least for right now, the mixology missions are mostly piggy-backed on other missions, after the activity is over for obvious reasons. They make a pleasant and enjoyable wind-down from the excitement and a great way to enjoy the more relaxed elements of being an international mystery woman.

All missions have different pricing, but a few examples are: Loaded Guns 1 at $100 and Loaded Guns 2 at $150; Seduce 1 at $75; and Ride the Edge is obviously pricier at $650. While larger groups can reserve an entire mission to themselves, most missions are made up of individual women and groups of a couple of friends each. The company’s website is here, and this is their Facebook page. The fabulous broad that is the PeguWife will be trying a mission or two, but I’d love to hear from any of you out there who give being a badass a whirl!

Nick and Nora Charles, the lead couple in the Thin Man movies. Full sized video here.

Gotta love this neat new T-Shirt design from Cheryl Charming. I also like this one that I could get away with wearing.

There are a host of things I love about cocktails, but there are two that pertain to this post. First, you can sometimes make the tiniest change to a recipe and have a whole new drink with a different character. And second, after the fun of creating something new, you can have a lot more fun coming up with a name for said creation.

Last night, I was perusing my copy of Paul Harrington’s Cocktail, looking for any likely looking drinks therein that I had not yet tried. The Nikki Finn caught my eye: a mix of cognac, Cointreau, and lemon juice, with a splash of Absinthe to give the right element of danger to a drink with a name reminiscent of a far more dangerous tipple. I liked the name, and the drink seemed promising. But I was not in the mood for absinthe, and my wife never is.

So I cast around a bit, and my eyes fell upon the bottle of Tobasco that I keep on the bar for my ongoing Bloody Mary experimentations. After a bit of tweaking, here’s what I came up with:

It’s really good. While spicy, the heat is nice, not overwhelming. It cleanses the palate but doesn’t hang around to burn. There is just enough sweet to make it appetizing, and while you can make out the cognac fairly well, the spiciness just about eliminates any alcoholic burn entirely.
Overall, I’m very pleased with it.

Now, if it’s a good enough drink to make again (and again), it needs a good name. I believe that an enduring drink name should be fun, lyrical, and evocative of its flavor profile. And some of the most famous are named after famous people or characters. The absinthe gives the Nikki Finn the appropriately poisonous vibe, but this drink, while still possessing the dangerous vibe, is much more friendly and spicy….

For me the name came easy: The Nikki Heat. Who’s she? Here:

Spicy enough for you, but not dangerous? How about this?

That is Stana Katic, who plays police detective Nikki Heat on the TV show Castle. Well, actually she plays police detective Kate Beckett on Castle. Character Detective Beckett is the inspiration for character Rick Castle (a novelist)’s new lead character in his mystery novels, named Nikki Heat. The show is the most Meta thing ever produced for network TV. It is so meta that the novels mentioned in the show actually exist. You can buy Heat Wave and Naked Heat on Amazon. They are actually damn good books, by the way.
You can even see both “Nikki Heat” and Kate Beckett in the same promo for the show here:

See? Meta.
And also, as you see, a good name for this little drink.

It think it’d be a great drink for Castle to feature at the bar he just bought, the Old Haunt in Manhattan. In fact I think he was soliciting cocktail ideas on Twitter a while back. Yes, Rick Castle has a real Twitter feed. Not Jameson Rook, the fake character in the real books who is based on Rick Castle himself, but the real Rick Castle who is a fake character on the real TV show. My guess is that they drink a lot in the writers’ room on this show.

If they did make mention of the Nikki Heat, they ought to serve it using this cognac:

How’s that for a bottle?
It is Landy Désir. I just bought a bottle in Texas because I buy every bottle of liquor that comes with a little hat. And even if it didn’t have the hat, I’d have bought it for my wife since she’s a seamstress and a bottle that is an actual dress form (the dress can come off, and the are even others so you can change the clothes apparently) is an obvious gift.
I haven’t opened it yet, and judging from the fact that there are no actual reviews of it anywhere on the web, I’m guessing most people just think it is too darn gorgeous to open. Rumor it is is quite good, so I’ll open mine soon and perhaps be the first to report.

[Update: Welcome, Wombat's Rule 5 wanderers! There's plenty more to see 'round here, Rule 5, Rule 5 o'clock, and occasionally even the politics of Rule 5 o'clock alike!]

This set of thoughts on Basement Bar design, and mantuary design specifically, is addressed primarily to married men, or men who live with the same woman full time and might as well be married. If you don’t figure this out before you build your Basement Bar/Mantuary, you will figure it out after, therefore it is best to keep it in mind at the design stage. It will save you a lot of work.

There is an implicit bargain in the creation of the Man Cave, a social compact if you will, that you will enter into when you carve out your sanctuary/personal space within the home. Your significant other will not ever say it, because it is far too self-evident to her to need vocalization. But it is a bedrock portion of whatever negotiations you do or do not need to go through to set aside and construct your reservation. Here it is:

The Bargain:
Men want their space, and women will happily let them have it.
But.
When guests of both sexes come over, the man cave must be rendered fit and open for visits from the ladies.

It’s a simple bargain, but complex in application.
First off, understand that no actual visit, or intention thereof, by women to your man cave, just the possibility, is needed to trigger the terms of the Bargain.
The party may be set up in the back yard. You might just have invited the Johnson’s over to play Pictionary. It might even be her teetotalling Aunt Bettie, inviting herself to dinner.
You might go a year without any outside women entering your bar. But your lady, no matter how great a broad she may be, is going to countenance the possibility of her frenemy Susan from Accounting being told she can’t enter your Mantuary.
Second, you need to understand that the bargain is not really about her friends being allowed into your sanctuary. She just needs to know that she can be welcome wherever you are. This dynamic changes from couple to couple, of course. Some Mantuarys really are retreats, where the man of the house goes to be separate from the woman. Others are simply the one area of the house where the man has primary control over the design and appearance of the space… subject of course to the Bargain. Essentially, you can put a No Gurlz Aloud sign on the door, but the Bargain says you can’t nail it in place.
Finally, the Bargain has a practical element to it as well. For most people, if you construct a really cool Basement Bar, it will be the best entertainment space in your house. It is only natural for her to want to enjoy it too at times.
So, we understand that there will be times when women will enter our Man Cave, our Mantuary, our Basement Bar. What is entailed in making it fit for this experience? There are two factors at play, design and maintenance.
First off, maintenance. Keep it clean guys. Remember the frenemy Susan? Imagine is she and your wife walked in to see this?

The next time you slept in your own bed would be during the Palin administration….
In all seriousness, mess is easy to prevent, and a bitch to clean up. In particular, watch out for smells. Limes smell great when you juice them, but not so much after ten days in the trash. And once smells set in in a Basement, they require significant effort to remove. If you don’t have a dishwasher down there (and sometimes even if you do), washing up all your glassware and bar tools in the half hour before your friends come over can be… stressful.
In addition to cleaning, maintenance covers basic repairs. Depending on your design choices, ratty armchairs may be acceptable, or they may not. When stuff gets broken, fix it. Chances are you want your Basement Bar to look great fulltime too. The Bargain can be useful to you as well, as an incentive to make sure you do the needed work.
Finally, think through the Bargain when you design and decorate your Basement Bar. Carefully. Your design choices may or may not need to be woman welcoming, or even friendly. But they can’t be (your) woman hostile.
There is the obvious, of course.

You may or may not be able to get away with this, your mileage may vary. A beer-centric Basement Bar with lots of ads, a few of which are Rule Fiveish, may fly. For the lounge lizards, you might try artwork like this:

But as I said, your mileage will vary, and not just with, ahem, artwork. In my house, I could go with the right Vargas-style liquor ad, but I’d get shot down if I wanted to fill the walls with dead animals.

This is not to say that you can’t have things in your Man Cave that annoy your significant other. Say you are one of those tragic Florida-Florida State marriages. Your Basement Bar’s whole reason for existence may be to be the one floor on which you can have your Gators rug. And as a bonus, that rug will probably be the one thing allowed to become and remain stained!
Regardless of what you put in your design, the important point is to keep your woman in mind (even, gasp, consult her) as you put together your Basement Bar. Whether it is a literal sanctuary, or just the one place where you get control over the stuff, she needs to know that she isn’t completely excluded.
But on second thought, don’t let the Gators rug get stained. It might be her plan to get it past repair, then invoke the Bargain. After all, she has the perfect sized Seminole rug in mind…

If you want to follow this specific series of posts on the Pegu Blog, you can subscribe to our Basement Bar feed here. Or you can just subscribe to the entire blog, with all its brilliant content, here!
Here’s a list of the other articles in this series that have been posted so far:

• Basement Bar Accessories #10: The NewAir Portable Ice Maker
• Basement Bar Accessories #6: DIY Kegerator
• Basement Bar Accessories: Herbal Assault Part 1
• Basement Bar Design #0: Introduction
• Basement Bar Design #1: Where, What, and Why.
• Basement Bar Design #2: Refrigerators
• Basement Bar Design #3: Ice Supply
• Basement Bar Design #4(a): Essential Glassware
• Basement Bar Design #4(b): Supplemental Glassware
• Basement Bar Design #4(c): Buying Glassware
• Basement Bar Design #5: Water and Washing Up
• Basement Bar Design #6: My Own Basement Bar
• Basement Bar Design #7: Bar Top and Countertop Surfaces
• Basement Bar Design #8(a): Artists
• Basement Bar Design #8(b) More Artists
• Basement Bar Design #8: Artwork
• Basement Bar Design #9: Tiki Bars
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #1: Lit Backbar Walls
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #2: Holiday Glassware Giveaways
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #3: Beer Dispensing from Heineken and Elsewhere
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #4: Branded Beer Taps
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #5: Pure American Ingenuity
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #7: The Man Wall
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #8: The Arkeg
• Basement Bar Design Accessories #9: Global Domination
• Basement Bar Design Accessories: Hidden Lairs
• Basement Bar Design Elsewhere in the Cocktailosphere
• Basement Bar Design Elsewhere in the Cocktailosphere #2
• Basement Bar Design Factoid #1: Sheds
• Basement Bar Design Factoid #2: Dangerous Party Invitees
• Basement Bar Design Factoid #3: Irish Pub in a (really big) Box
• Basement Bar Design Factoid #4: Mr. Blendtec, activate the defenses!
• Basement Bar Design Factoid #5: 1800 Tequila’s Mancave Contest
• Basement Bar Design News: The Wall Street Journal Notices That Home Bars Are “In”
• Basement Bar Design, Things to Consider #1: The Bargain
• Basement Bar Design: A Tour of the Parade of Homes
• Basement Bar Design: Star Trek Doors
• Basement Bar Overhaul: Dressing for Tiki Month
• Bulletin, Bulletin, Bulletin!
• Christmas Idea: Martini Shaker
• Fun With Time-Lapse
• I Saved at Least $10,000 Because of Cocktail Blogging…
• Jacob Grier Invites Us to Up Our Bartending Game.
• New Basement Bar Contest From Grant’s Whisky
• New Blog Function
• SideBlog: A Really Clever, Easy IKEA Home Bar
• SideBlog: Basement Bars Are Helm’s Deep For Men
• SideBlog: Blender Drink Aficionados Booking For Europe With Spare Luggage Space
• SideBlog: Making Tiki Stuff: Royal Tiki
• SideBlog: New York Post Notices February is a Good Time For Tiki Month
• SideBlog: Selling Tiki Stuff: Cheeky Tiki
• SideBlog: The Manliest Bottle Opener Ever
• SideBlog: Ultra Modern Tiki Torches
• The Bar Accessory The EVERY Cocktail Geek Must Obtain
• The Sixth Day of Christmas
• This Year’s Final Exam: A Full-Bore Tiki Party
• Tiki Timeout: Bar Building and BlogBarCrawl Update
• Trader Tiki’s Basement Bar in the News
• Unique Tiki Mugs
• Wow, They Even Have Black Friday Sales In the Cocktail World….

One of the posts I always look for and read each morning in my RSS reader is Jacob Grier’s Morning Links. For those of you who don’t know of Jacob, he’s a genuine, free-range Libertarian, as in former Washington Think Tank-type Libertarian. In additions to writing about cocktails and coffee, he has political thoughts available to puzzle, challenge and generally irritate and piss off both Republicans and Democrats alike. He recently moved from D.C. to the Pacific Northwest (further demonstrating his intelligence), but then exposed his Beltway background by changing his blog’s name (but not the number of the website thankfully) to Liquidity Preference. Jacob, why on Earth did you rename your blog to sound like a white paper from the Rand Corporation?
Anyway, among his other virtues, Jacob posts a selection of political, culinary, and downright odd links. They are always interesting and occasionally (as in this morning) thought-provoking. Check his daily post out; it’s like Fark without the unsolicited fingers or Instapundit without the blender-blogging.
Anyway, biography done. Let’s talk about what he linked today that got me thinking: An article in Scientific American about taste in space. The article is about how astronauts find flavors quite bland in microgravity, making them crave hot sauce and shrimp cocktail. Now, given who I am and where I read about this, my thoughts immediately turned to how this will affect the offerings to be served at early versions of Ten-Forward.
Of course for now there is (officially) no drinking booze in space. Which is too bad, as any reader of this blog can tell you, since there will clearly be no real progress toward living in space until we get the details of cocktail hour ironed out. At least the Russians (of course) are making the right noises. It is a sad comment on our political environment, IMHO, that for all the effort and money being spent studying how to get a number of astronauts from here to Mars and back in a confined space without killing each other, there has been virtually no discussion of the simple expedient of a nice Manhattan. Mark my words, when NASA hires Gary Regan and starts sponsoring symposia at Tales of the Cocktail, you’ll know that we are getting serious about successfully going to Mars or colonizing the Moon, and not until.

Mission Specialist Gary Regan (Astro-Mixologist)

Oh, and by the way Gary. Quit kvetching about the metric system. The Administration does not have time for another massively unpopular imposition of change on our chosen lifestyle right now. And NASA in particular needs no more worries on that front. You don’t want to be splattered all over the Martian landscape before you stir up your first Mons Olympus Martini, do you?
Alright, what will we need to do for space drinking?
First off, space missions will go with cocktails, not beer and wine. Yay! But why? Because beer and wine are inefficient uses of space and mass. They also do not last as long or store as well. We will have to sacrifice freshly squeezed juice of course, leaving men like Gabriel Szaszko ineligible for space travel, but is that such a bad thing, really?

Inefficient spaceship design.

I’d hope that we won’t just go with those plastic foil baggies like I showed above. Let’s mix the drinks on board. Space cocktails will be solely for therapeutic purposes after all, and part of the simple, refreshing pleasure of a good cocktail is mixing it, or watching it being crafted for you. Also, one good bartender could replace a whole staff of astro-shrinks. More mass savings!
However, microgravity does present some obvious difficulties with standard drink serving. Getting the drink out of the shaker would be hard, and getting it to stay in a cocktail glass even harder. I think we can all agree that having astronauts floating around the cabin while snorking up globules of Sidecar might produce dangerous levels of silly. And I think we can all imagine the mayhem that would result should you help yourself to some of Buzz Aldrin’s G&T as it floated by….
Fortunately, NASA appears to have some people on staff who have their minds in the right place. Witness the shape of the new spacesuit water container:

But to return to the generally serious nature of this post, astronaut and obvious master mixologist Don Pettit really has invented an open drinking vessel that actually works in microgravity. The following video is seriously worth a look.

Just add a stem or some kind of lanyard to keep your hand from warming the drink, and we have the drinking vessel that will carry man and broad into space. (Note to NASA, dudes and chicks do not good astronauts make.)
And finally what will be the recipe for the Martian Martini? What will we put in our Moonhattans? And what will be the secret ingredient in the someday to be famous Tiki drink, the Tycho Bowl? Well, the article that Jacob linked to start all this wretched silliness suggests that our taste buds are dulled the longer we stay in space. We can expect therefore that more potent, bitter and sour, even spicy flavored cocktails will be the norm. Cross Cosmopolitans, Nutty Irishmen, and Vodka Gimlets off the list.
When the new space craze hits, expect ads with chicks in skintight spacesuits for Angostura Bitters to be as common as Grey Goose ads today.

Astronauts will also be wanting drinks with enhanced sour components. So expect drinks that use lemons and limes to outstrip those with OJ or pineapple juice or sodas. And we should see scientific advances is storing and preserving fresh citrus. But the once exotic Screwdriver will fade further from the public consciousness.
And I’d expect that more flavorful spirits will also surge again to the fore. Sorry, vodka folks. Look to whiskeys and rums, and especially gin to be the choice of the extraterrestrial generation.
So what will be the really popular cocktails in space? Lets see….
(I swear on my father’s grave that I was not going here when I started this post!)
A gin cocktail, with potent sour elements like lime, and front stage featuring of Angustora Bitters…
You know it, baby!

This month’s Mixology Monday, hosted by the fabulous broads at LUPEC Boston, asks a question that is of genuine importance: Given someone who has never had a cocktail before (tragic, I know), what would you offer them as their first? You never get a second chance at a first impression, after all.

Let me guess.
You suggest a Pegu!

No. No I don’t, Ms. Smarty-Pants. And for all you who know me and were waiting for me to suggest the One True Cocktail, don’t be silly. For the gin-virgin cocktail drinker, I absolutely suggest the Pegu as a perfect gateway, but that’s another question.
What’s at stake here? You don’t want to offer something so bland or sweet as to leave them with the impression that cocktails are just another form of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, one you have to mix yourself. You want to give them an idea of the depth and sophistication there is to be had in the cocktail world, thus we’ll discard such offerings as White Russians or Strawberry Daiquiris.
On the other hand, let’s be honest. A lot of the favorite drinks we love around here in the cocktailosphere are a bit… sophisticated for a first time drinker. Just as you wouldn’t take someone to King Lear for their first play, you aren’t going to want to spring a Corpse Reviver #2, a Negroni, an Aviation, or even a Pegu on a neophyte.
Let’s answer three basic questions about what our entry level drug should be like.
I’ll start with the base spirit. I’d stay away from gin or whatever variety of whisk(e)y. These may be the kings of booze, providing the most depth and interest, but they have strong flavors what are all, to one extent or another, acquired tastes. Likewise, I’d avoid any specialty liquors, such as tequila, pisco, cachaça, ouzo, etc. That leaves us with vodka and rum. In fact, the case could be made that the best of all possible introductory cocktails would be either a well-made Cuba Libré, or a similarly executed Screwdriver. But either of those would would be too easy for for a MxMo post, and besides, I’d want someone’s first cocktail to be served in a cocktail glass, not a highball. I’m going to go with vodka because it has the fewest negative connotations (to the non-connoisseur), and because it is the blankest of slates.
The next thing is the personality of the drink. Attitude is the core of cocktails and the cocktail mindset, folks. A first cocktail should be evocative for the drinker. It should be publicly cool, and secretly a little silly. Most of all, the neophyte needs a decent chance of having always wanted one of those. So my advice is to go with a well-known, iconic drink. This eliminates otherwise excellent possibilities like the Moscow Mule.
Lastly, is our hypothetical drinker a man or a woman? This last is obviously not about the drink, but the drinker. And yes, it lets me cheat LUPEC’s question by offering two answers. Sue me. It also gives me a chance to get on my old, familiar hobby horse about Broads versus Chicks. The differences are myriad, but for this post, I’ll focus on broads as women who are more robust in their tastes. A chick given a binary choice will always hew to the option perceived as more feminine. A broad will choose based on her personal taste. There is a similar dichotomy with men, but for once it’s more complex than for women. It’s also less likely to come into play here so I’ll save you the time right now.

Thank you, Dr. Doug.
Where’d you get your degree again?

Shut up. The point is to offer two choices, both vodka-based, both well-known to Americans (at least) of all drinking types, one appealing to the bright and lively, the other to the darkly cool. When made properly, both are darn fine drinks. Neither is terribly complex, but both give a hint of the magic mixology can produce. And both will provide a lesson in the importance of skill and quality ingredients in making cocktails; said lesson will be learned later, the first time your new cocktailian orders one of these at an airport bar….

OK, get on with it.
I’m thirsty.

Oh, very well. The offerings shall be: The Vodka Martini and the Cosmopolitan.
Appeal to the guys, and the brassier of broads, with the old-school James Bond cocktail.

Appeal to the chicks, and your most beta of males, with Carrie’s concoction.

Whichever you make for your neophyte, make the same for yourself. Then, for the second round, make them the same, but make yourself a more advanced product like a Pegu, a Manhattan or even a Pisco Sour. Watch their face as they eye your drink and start to get an idea of the vastly greater variety hereabouts than in the world of Bud versus Guinness….

As the Internet’s Fifth Leading Authority on Broads™, I feel compelled by recent events to step out of the cocktail arena for a post, delving once again into what makes a Great Broad. Not to bury the lede, I’m talking about Senator McCain’s selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. I am amazed to see a woman who is a serious exemplar of a Great Broad on a major ticket. It changes more than this presidential race, it will likely change American politics, for the better, forever. And if she is successful, it will (politics aside) sure be fun.
First, let me make the following disclosure: I was seriously dissatisfied with our choices in this election before Friday. I simply don’t much like either Senator McCain or Senator Obama. And as a writer, I believe there is a special layer in Hell for plagiarists, Senator Biden!
I have written here often about my affection for Broads. My wife is a great Broad, as if my mother. So, what is a Broad, and why is Governor Palin such a great Broad? The following picture could almost be my entire post:

That’s her office, folks.

Nice picture!
So how much time have you spent Google image searching her?

Ha… ha. Not as much as the Morons on the Right. And not remotely as much as the feverish chumps to the left of the Left (sorry, no link for you, you miserable bastards!) Besides, while she is certainly… photogenic, that has nothing to do with her Broad-ness. Broads don’t have to be knock-outs. If she is attractive (as the Governor is, in spades), she recognizes it, enjoys it, and uses it. And uses it without shame, and not in a shameful way. She needed money for college, so she laughed her way through some beauty pageants to get it.

Hey, speaking of attractive, have you seen the First Dude?

Geez, Dear!
Do you have to treat him like a piece of meat?!? Honestly.

…!

Are you two done?

HE sure is….

Anyway, Broads play and work in a man’s world without being mannish. The Governor has that down.
How does she roll in male bastions? Let’s see: Bush pilot? Check. Commercial fisherman? Check. Kirk Gibson sports moment? Check. Lots of guns? Check. Landscape of Alaska littered with political corpses of people who didn’t live up to her standards of ethics or performance? Check.
And how about still thoroughly female? Sharp dresser? Check. Mother of five? Check? Married High School sweetheart? And stayed married? Check. PTA? Check.
Incidentally, Hillary learned this lesson late in the primary (too late). She began to appreciate her inner Broad, and she’s probably as popular right now as she has ever been in her political life.
Today’s latest scandal reinforces her Broad-ness. As I have said over and over, the thing about a Broad is that she is who she is. She is genuine. Like it or loathe it, she is it.
Being a great Broad has more to do with being Vice President than you might think. It says a tremendous amount about the person involved, regardless of experience or political positions. Senator Obama’s candidacy has proven the importance of personality. There are lots of other things I like about her, and lots questions about her as well, but that’s beyond the scope of this little cocktail party. I’m just saying both parties need more Broads.

UPDATE: (Because I can’t resist this one….)

What is the difference between Barack Obama and Sarah Palin?
One of them is little more than an elegant, attractive, dare I say sexy piece of eye candy.

The other one kills her own food.

Thanks to Mother, May I Sleep With Treacher?

I haven’t scraped someone else’s list for a post in a while, but DrinkPlanner’s 10 Commandments of Drinking Like a Man is both clever and (inadvertently I’m sure) insightful. Like most such lists, I love a few, would twist a few more, and blow my nose at others.

Thou Shalt Learn to Enjoy Whisk(e)y – Bourbon, Scotch, Irish, Tennessee whiskey and every other form of the drink shall heretofore be your best buddy….

heretofore??? doesn’t he mean henceforth? Let me get this straight. You are quoting a list with a major gramatical error? Have you no standards?

No. No I don’t.
Sorry DrinkPlanner, she’s a grammar nazi. But she’s a great broad (defined at least in part as a woman who drinks like a man whenever she damn well feels like it), so she probably drinks as much whisk(e)y as I do. Which isn’t that much. The brown liquors are for me a drink that reflects my mood. I have to be feeling particularly languid or depressed to go there.

Thou Shalt Not Consume Drinks With Idiotic Gimmicky Names Meant to Cover Up How Girly They Are – So help me God, if I see any of you jackasses out there with a Sex on the Beach or a Screw Me Blue in your hands, I’ll slap it to the ground and eat your worthless soul….

A) These names don’t cover anything up. At least they are honest in advertising the exact intentions of the man who is ordering or even drinking them.
B) You forgot the Pink Panty Pulldown in your list of offenders.

The Way You Treat Bartenders and Waitstaff Says More About You Than You Know

Truer words hath not been spoken. Nuff said.

He of course has others on his list, or it wouldn’t be ten commandments, now would it? Go read them there.
Or stick with me, and I’ll add a few of my own.

1. Shots Are For Special Occasions If you are the only one doing shots (and especially if you are the only one there), you are not drinking like a man, you are drinking like a drunk. So shoot in groups, and not often, as they get out of hand. Remember, payday is not a special occasion.
2. Wine Is Always And Only Made From Grapes
   

   Q. What was the precious trade secret bequeathed by the dying wine maker to his assembled family?
   A. Wine can also be made from grapes.
   —Everyday Drinking, the Distilled Kingsley Amis

The King was talking about really crappy ordinary wine, but I am talking about all wine. Men do not drink wine made from fruits other than grapes. They. Just. Don’t.

I was digging through this month’s MxMo (Lots of good posts this month!) to see if I could find any bloggers to add to my Blogbarcrawl that both seemed interesting and worked behind bars.

I found one that I had already been looking at, LUPEC Boston, who wrote this month about something I can’t get here: Creme de Violette. But what caught my eye was one of their categories: Broads, with such topics as MIT’s new president, Susan Hockfield, and a cocktail to commemorate her hiring. (I won’t hold it against them that the Lady Hopkins uses Southern Comfort!) They have more than 20 posts on Broads, and while I suspect their politics and mine don’t meet in too many places, we both obviously have a similar respect for how powerful and positive a word Broad can be! I could easily see one or more of them having that bumper sticker that says: Well-Behaved Women Never Made History! I hate that bumpersticker. It’s only partially true (e.g. I doubt Susan Hockfield is ill-behaved), and it is just as true to say that well-behaved men never made history either!

I checked out the co-bloggers’ bio pages. They mostly do not say much about themselves, but at least one, Misty Kalkofen (which nom-de-blog she employs, I can’t figure out!) tends bar! Look for the Green Street Grill pin on the Pegu Blog Blogbarcrawl™, and go buy some cocktails invented by ladies from her. Tell her the Pegu Blog sent you.