Aaaaah!
You’re being too scary, Doug!

What? I haven’t even started writing yet.

You are about to do the scariest of all blog posts, aren’t you? A repost?

Um, yeah. I am. Sorry.
This has been a lame two months around here, but Real Life has needed no costume to be scary.
Why is a repost so scary for you?

In case you hadn’t noticed, I don’t get out much, except when you write here. Reposts are just another chance for me to not get out of the drawer.
…
It’s dark in there….

Hey, you’ve got your own Twitter account and everything these days! You can always mock me there. Or go mock SeanMike….

Anyway everyone, Happy Halloween! I hope you have a drunken good time after all the urchins have been bought off. Since I have had no chance to create anything new for this year’s festivities, I’ll simply offer excerpts from two earlier Halloween missives that tickle my fancy.

The first is the greatest cocktail-themed Halloween Costume ever: Morgan Hendry’s Tiki Bar Tiki.

Secondly, I’ll embed here a video that I actually made, showing the results of the Liquor Fairy-inspired Halloween cocktail, The Skeletal Mule.

Be sure to save some Three Musketeers for me when I ring your doorbell!

I’ve been working on a lot of back office stuff here on the blog, and I’d like to let you know what I’ve done so far. I’d also like a little help from both my fellow bloggers and my regular commenters to ensure what I’ve done works, and to fill in some gaps that I’m not sure I can do perfectly on my own. Some of the changes are to help me out, and some are to help you. The SPAM stuff I’ve done is to help all of us. But in the process, I’ve noted more I can do to help my fellow bloggers as well.

First, the main thing I have to ask of you relates to my Blogroll. I haven’t worked on maintaining it for a long time, and it is woefully out of date. I know there a lot of cocktail bloggers who read me but aren’t on my roll. Figuring out who they are would take more time than I have, thus I’m crowd-sourcing it. So please do me (and yourself) a favor, take a few seconds to check the left sidebar and drop me a line if I don’t have you on my blogroll. Make sure you give me both your URL and your RSS. The main address is for the blogroll, and the RSS feeds the “Recent Discussion” widget on the right sidebar. I’ve examined both the SEO literature and my own traffic logs. While people don’t pay as much attention to them as they used to, Blogrolls still help with Google-fu and actual hits. The RSS-fed links on the right in particular generate a pretty significant number of out-clicks for me.
I’ll also humbly ask that if you read this blog, check your own blogroll. I’d like to be there!

The next stuff is all complete, I hope.

That means he is both unable, and too lazy, to test out everything himself. Please squawk if you see something that doesn’t seem right.

Yeah. If all you do is read this blog, you won’t notice any of the rest of this. If you ever comment, you will. And I really want you guys to comment more! Comments on a blog are like furniture in a house: They make it look lived in.

Now, I recently added Captcha technology to the comments. The SPAM was starting to get out of hand, and I knew I’d get too far behind of stomping it when the next great roadtrip begins. It seems to be working well so far, but I know it is a pain in the ass for you when you comment. And that defeats my campaign to get you guys to actually say something about what I write!
To fix this, I’ve opened up user registration. You will see a link in the comments section of each post that will send you to the registration page. In return for doing that, you not only won’t have to screw with the Captcha anymore, you also won’t have to fill in your name, email, and URL in the future either!
There. I saved you 30-60 keystrokes, so now you have no excuse not to comment.

For bloggers, there is an added tiny incentive to registering. Both the link back to your own website you provide at registration, as well as any links you embed in your comment, will have the noFollow attribute removed. WordPress automatically removes all reader-created links from search engine consideration (noFollow) to discourage spammers. While it doesn’t actually discourage the bastards of course, it does reduce their ability to screw with the quality of search engine results. But it also means that a blog community like the Cocktailosphere doesn’t help each others’ PageRank, etc. when they comment.
With user registration, I can keep screwing the SPAMmers while no longer denying our community a benefit. So, the more you comment, the more pages will show to Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. as linking your blog! You’ll rocket up the search engines! Men will want to be you. Women will want to be with you. Heck, men will want to be with you! It’s a floor wax! It’s a dessert topping!
Seriously, it’s a minor benefit, but it does have an effect.

I’ve got other ideas to enrich the commenting experience, but I’d like to hear from you, too. If you’ve seen any cool stuff on other sites that you’d like to have on more blogs (including this one), tell me in the comments.

Hey!
Did you see what he just did there?

Source: From Me To You

The simple creation of a great photograph can turn a bland, quick-hit recipe post into a real hit, while a long, intricate article that you slave over gets no attention because it has no pic, or worse, a crappy one. And producing that great photo can be quite difficult, which is why some of us do such a good job, and some of us don’t.

But the bar has just been raised, folks. Above, you see an incredible “new” format of electronic imagery, the Cinemagraph. Actually, it is simply an animated GIF, a format old as the (internet) hills, with a specific, very striking style. Rather than creating a quick and dirty video substitute, the Cinemagraph has the appearance of a still photo in which a single, important element is just slightly… alive.
Here’s another from the same source, fashion and occasional food photographer, Jamie Beck:

It’s an incredible effect, and one that she and financé Kevin Burg have pioneered. Like all great ideas, it looks so wonderfully simple, but takes great skill and special circumstances to execute.

A good drink photo is also harder than it looks, of course. You need a good camera, tripod, and especially good light to shoot one. To do even a decent cinemagraph, you need all that and a few things more. You work from video, so you have different camera requirements and no flash, and you need to carefully compose your shot to have only one thing moving in it. Then there are the technical challenges of translating your video to a GIF.
Why not just use a video?
The thing that makes this technique so striking is that around 90% of the shot is a still photo, with none of the artifacts, grain, or simple, almost invisible motions that are found even in video of a static subject. This is what brings out the movement you preserve so spiffily.

I haven’t tried this yet, as I don’t have the right camera for it, but I hope some of my fellow bloggers will give it a shot. Here are two good tutorials to get us all started on the techique. The first is from Fernando J Baez, and the second by Christopher Burt. They each cover some different aspects of the challenge and are clear and concise. For more on the thinking that went into the technique to begin with, here’s a good interview with Jamie and Kevin in Turnstyle.

So, my fellow denizens of the Cocktailosphere, who will be the first to give us a cinemagraph of a stream of Martini sluicing over an olive, or a sultry bartender swirling a barspoon in a glass?

I recently got a tip from fellow cocktail blogger, Michael Dietsch, that several of our friends and fellows were nominated by Saveur magazine for their annual awards in the category of Best Cocktail Blog. You have to register to vote for your favorite, which is OK, but you also have to register just to see the list of nominees, which is kinda lame.
They also give no info on why they nominated each contestant, so I’ll do it for you.

Cask Strength is in what I call the Pro-Blogger Category. Andrew Bohrer is a Seattle-area bartender and very funny fellow. He blogs on a wide variety of subjects and drink styles. My favorite of his work is his current series 10 Rules of Drinking Like a Man (now up to number six).

Alcademics is the personal booze musings of professional writer Camper English. Camper gets to travel extensively around the country and world covering the liquor industry (this is why I hate him), and a lot of the peripheral stuff he’s not being paid to write about ends up on Alcademics. More importantly, he also is a an inveterate cocktail experimenter and the internet’s leading ice geek (and that is why I love him).

Cocktailians is the cocktailian project of Sam Meyer, a.k.a. Vidiot. It’s an entertaining collection of anecdotes, drink recipes, and an eternal source of Rule 2 linky goodness.

Another Pro-Blogger blog, Drink Dogma, is the project of Bobby Heugel. Bobby is one of my, and I suspect many cocktail bloggers’, personal heroes, in that he has gone from blogger to co-owner and creator of one of the country’s truly great craft cocktail bars, Anvil in Houston, Texas. During Anvil’s early stages of development, his blogging really fell off (I wonder why), but he has been writing much more lately, with great posts on the industry, drinks, and the bartending lifestyle.

Jeffrey Morganthaler’s eponymous blog is one of the granddaddys of the Cocktailosphere. One of Oregon’s leading bartenders, Jeffrey writes one of the more professionally utilitarian blogs out there. Many of his posts (though not all) are little reference resources that remain useful indefinitely. One such post is his Ginger Beer Brewing instruction that I once called The Greatest Cocktail Blog Post Ever.

Last (but only on the list) is the inimitable Kaiser Penguin. I’m tempted to call him the one and only “Garnishblogger“, but Rick does a lot more than that. He also is great with housemade ingredients, has an unhealthy obsession with Fernet Branca, and does some very fun thought pieces as well.

That is the six. Who am I voting for? Not telling, except to say that I am voting, and so should you!

I sideblogged this before, when I first noticed it, but did not expand on it because I just didn’t know what to make of it.

eCairn is a social media consulting firm whose job is helping businesses find leverage points in social media and the blogosphere. In other words, they seek out who are the “Influencers” in various “social media Tribes”. Further, they analyze those tribes as a whole to provide insights into how to sell to them. It’s a fascinating business model, and while I am hardly familiar with the company, they seem to combine both human analysis with a variety of Google-Fu and other automated algorithms to reach their conclusions.

Among many other reports, they just released a study of what they call the Socialcohol Media, i.e. beer, wine, and liquor websites/blogs. The picture above is an influence map of the various drinks tribes, and how they interact. The blue blob on top is what Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit originally dubbed the Cocktailosphere, i.e. the liquor blogs. (See what I did there? No? I’ll explain below) They very accurately note that each sub-tribe pretty much sticks to its own knitting, but nevertheless are interdependant. The purple blob is all the whiskybloggers, who they say form a kind of mortar between us. Congratulations, scotch drinkers, you are the UN of drinking!

Along with this map of how we all interact as a whole, eCairn picks out a list of the top 20 most influential sites in the online drinking community overall. They list The Pegu Blog as number 18, fifth of the top five liquor sites.

Woot!
Dude, you are the MAN!

Am I? Really?

My initial instinct was to laugh this off. How could I be influential? Then I read the reactions of some of the other bloggers on the list, and saw that they too seemed a bit bemused by the study. Camper English’s Alcademics is number one on the list among cocktailbloggers. He notes that his raw traffic (each of our raw traffic) is dwarfed by Darcy O’Neil’s Art of Drink, which is located several rungs down. Both of them are overwhelmingly better known in the professional bar community than I am. The number one, Jay Brooks of Brookston Beer Bulletin points out that he, Camper, and Good Grape are all ranked above the New York Freaking Time’s drinkblog, The Pour.

Being the curious and intuitive thinker I am, I just haven’t been able to let this go. Do I believe this result? More to the point, can I figure out how it was reached?

Let’s start with that.

Blogging well is a lot of work, so I want to be read as a reward, don’t I? I wrote a post almost two years ago on how to increase traffic and hits through how you blog, rather than just what you blog. It was in turn based on a much more deeply thought out study done by Stacy McCain, entitled “How to Get a Million Hits“. (Warning, that links to a eeeeevil conservative Hunter S. Thompsonesque blogger who has spent time wandering my basement bar, videotaping me pour drinks without warning.)

I heel to a number of the tenets in his post and mine whenever I open my WordPress dashboard. And there are a few that I think were especially important to my appearing on the eCairn list.

First and foremost, I reach out beyond our tribe. Not so much to the beer and wine guys, though I do that sometimes, but to tribes beyond socialcohol entirely. I do this with links to those tribes, and by soliciting links from them. I make this work by writing a lot of posts synthesizing booze and other stuff. I write about booze politics and reach out to political blogs. I write about bar accessories and reach out to the gadget blogs. I write about Basement Bars and connect with men’s lifestyle, design, and artist communities. Booze marketing being what it is, when I write about that, I reach out to the, ahem, Rule 5 community. I link to myself relentlessly, and link anybody who has ever linked me, whenever I get an excuse. (That’s why I linked back to Instapundit above. I told you I’d explain. It is axiomatic in blogging that if you want your server crashed from overwork occasionally, get in Glenn’s good graces.)

Second, in furtherance of the previous goal, I write about a very wide range of alcohol-related subjects. Lots of people write about each subject I cover better or more in depth than I. I don’t see too many cocktailbloggers who address as wide an array of stuff as I.

Third, I just make a lot of links, period. Look around this post at all the orange words. There are 15 external links in this one post, and lots more links back to myself. I’m sure this is one factor that is included in eCairn’s analysis.

Fourth, I post a lot, and I post regularly, and I’ve been posting for almost four years now. Fresh content brings loyal readers, of which I have a bunch. It also makes Google and Bing happy. This blog shows up on a shocking number of first page results for a lot of common cocktail search terms, though I wish my meatspace friends didn’t always sound so surprised when they notice this….

Lastly, my traffic certainly isn’t up there with the big dogs like Wine Spectator and the Times, but I do alright.

So, I game the system a bit. My regular job of killing people for money allows me chunks of time to blog, so I can manage all this relentlessly. I think these are the reasons I am on the list of Top Twenty alcohol social media outlets. But does this mean I am really influential?

Yes and no.

If by influential, you mean bar professionals or big traditional media outlets look to me for insight and guidance, Hell no. Most don’t know who I am. My posts don’t make big waves (a scary analogy to use these tragic days) when they come out either.

But I do see ripples from things I write as time moves on. More importantly, I think I’m one of those bridging sites they talk about a lot on eCairn’s site. I try to bring readers to the cocktailosphere who might not otherwise know it exists. And I send them on to other sites, in our tribe and out, as much as I can. As a relentless SiteMeter watcher, I can sometimes see this happen. A lot more happens beyond my ability to see directly. But whatever the actual extent of the Pegu Blog Media Empire’s influence is, I know there is at least a little, and I’m happy with that.

Gizmodo Asks, “Why Are All These Bloggers So Damn Good Looking?” Um, because we all ARE so good looking, of course!

Really, Dennis? Could you have put this one more on a tee for me?

It is Mixology Monday time again, and this month’s host is Dennis at Rock & Rye. Here is his charge for this round:

The challenge this month is to bring to light a drink that you think deserves to be resurrected from the past, and placed back into the spotlight. It could be pre-prohibition, post-war, that horrible decade known as the 80′s, it doesn’t really matter. As long as it is somewhat obscure, post it up. If possible, try to keep to ingredients that are somewhat readily available. While we all appreciate the discovery of an amazing cocktail, if we can’t make it, it’s no fun for anyone.

This is just too damn easy, folks. May I present to you a cocktail that has labored in great obscurity, and still labors in far more anonymity than it deserves? Let’s try that exotic offering from the late British Colonial Era of Burma, a delicious and exotic gin sour called…

How could I do anything else? Three and half years, 600+ posts, and 275,000 visitors ago, I started this entire blog with the purpose of bringing this hardly remembered classic back to the minds of cocktail drinkers everywhere. I’d been pushing this on my own since the turn of the century, badgering every bartender I encountered while traveling around the country killing people into learning the recipe. I can’t tell you why I have this obsession schtick, but the last decade has been one long-form version of MxMo 52 for me.

There are a variety of ways to make a Pegu, but all have certain things in common. Pegus all are sours made with gin, orange liqueur, lime and bitters. All are light, bracing, delicious, and deceptively potent.
This cocktail was created by and for the men who were members of the Pegu Club, an outpost of British culture in the frontier of The Empire in the jungles of Burma. These were men who were men of culture, refinement, and breeding, who simultaneously straddled the globe and bent it to their will (for a time). They appreciated a drink with subtlety and grace, that accompanied that refinement with serious power. A drink, in short, meant for this guy:

Here’s the first version of the Pegu I ever encountered, in Paul Harrington’s important Cocktail: The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century.

This is a delicious drink. It is easy to make, and most reasonably equipped bars (no bar is reasonably equipped without fresh limes for juice) can make it for you. Harrington’s Pegu is constructed to capture the feel of the older recipes, while using ingredients readily available in normal bars. For further discussion on this “easily make-able today version vs. classic version” issue, see this post on versions of the Aviation. Harrington’s Pegu is still my favorite, and accounts for more than half of the ones I drink myself at home and nearly all of those I have in bars. It’s best with mainstream gins, especially floral jobs like Sapphire.

The first variation of a Pegu was also the first one made for me by a bartender who already knew of the drink before I told him about it. The man was Peter Dorelli, back in 2000 when he was still head barman at the American Bar at the Savoy Hotel in London. My wife and I went to England and France for ten days that Spring. She wanted to see and do a hundred different things in London. I wanted to go to the American Bar—because I figured since the Pegu first saw print in The Savoy Cocktail Book, I ought to be able to order one without giving a class for the first time. It worked. It was a sufficiently unusual drink order that Dorelli came to our table, and sat and talked with me about cocktails for quite a long time. It was wonderful.

The drink he brought me looked quite different from what I had expected. And while it tasted just right, the texture was smoother and the color lighter. It was a bit frothy. Apparently he thought all Americans are Health Nazis, since he took a lot of convincing before he admitted that he made his Pegus with a dollop of raw egg white.

While just as powerful, a Silver Pegu is even more gentle in the mouth. And less aggressively orangey pink. If you are worried about the dangers of raw egg whites, you have three options:

1. Buy pasteurized eggs. (The whites are a little less effective than regular)
2. Consider the amount of disinfectant that tiny amount of egg white will be swimming in.
3. Live a little.

When I make these (which is rare, as the eggs are a pain), I usually use a big, juniper-heavy gin, like Broker’s. The egg white takes the natural softening of the gin in all Pegus and goes almost too far. A good burly gin fights back and comes through admirably.

In the ten years I’ve been pushing this drink, the cocktail world has, to say the least, changed. The range and numbers of fine drinks being served has exploded. Naturally, business has responded by introducing new ingredients and reintroducing old ones to facilitate.
Today you will easily find, for the first time in 50-80 years, not only one, but a variety of such ingredients as orange bitters and orange curaçao. Now, you can drink a cocktail much closer to what they were making in the Nineteen Twenties, when the Pegu first made it’s name around the globe.

This is pretty close to most early versions of the recipe you find. It is also just about what Audrey Saunders slings in her wonderful Pegu Club lounge in Manhattan. (It’d be wonderful even without that name and signature cocktail… just not as wonderful.) Lighter in color, the Pegu Club is also lighter on the tongue. Interestingly, the orange bitters doesn’t do as good a job of softening the juniper, so the Broker’s I recommend for the Silver Pegu will ruin a Pegu Club. When making these, I’m much more likely to choose Beefeater, or better yet, a light touch gin like G’Vine or Aviation.
For the orange curaçao, I often still use Cointreau, though I’ve had some good experiments with Creole Shrubb. I strongly advise against Citronage in Pegus. Other curaçaos do other things, and if you’ve got a good recommendation, please let me know!
I’m making a lot more Pegu Clubs lately, in part because the PeguWife prefers them.
The chief disadvantage of the Pegu Club is that while any reasonably equipped bar can make a Pegu, only a premium cocktail establishment will have the stuff to make Pegu Clubs.

There you have it: Three cocktails, any one of which you can legitimately call a Pegu, and any one of which will make your cocktail snob’s heart sing. Not only that, but if there is a good entry gin cocktail for the “Oh I don’t drink gin” crowd, this drink is it. Help me out here, have a Pegu yourself, and pass along the good news to ten of your friends!

I’ll add a few words about the challenges and the rewards of running a cocktail blog called The Pegu Blog. I started this blog almost as an exercise in self-parody of my “obsession” with this drink. But I really do want more people to relearn this great cocktail. I figured out very early on that I couldn’t just write about Pegus. As wonderful as the drink is, there is not enough material to keep up regular postings, and no one would read such a monomaniacal set of writings if I tried.

That’s OK, Doug.
No one reads your writings anyway.

I thought I’d make it through this post without you.

Hey!
I’d never miss a Mixology Monday!

So here you are, insulting me. You know, bloggers have sockpuppets to give them a way to praise themselves…

Hence, your exercise in the old self-parody!

Pardon me while I hit my head on the desk….

Regardless of Guy’s snotty commentary, I’ve found that the best way to get you to read about Pegus is to write (hopefully) entertainingly about cocktails in general. Less than 10% of my posts are really about Pegus at all. Thanks for visiting, this Mixology Monday, and I hope you look around the site while you are here, or even subscribe to my feed. Now that you’re done, head on back over to Rock & Rye, thank Dennis for all the work he’d done, and enjoy the other forgotten classics we cocktail writers have put together for you!

…for a price. A recent article in the Los Angeles Times (via @LauraNelson, via @RumDood) notes a startling fact: Several new models of digital cameras include a cuisine or food setting. If you aren’t interested in camera features, skip down to here to read about the problems arising from increasingly easy food photography.
Nikon’s Food Mode appears to be available on many models of its CoolPix line of point-n-clicks. Olympus calls it Cuisine Mode. Sony offers a Gourmet Mode, along with larding their cameras up with smile detection and blink prevention shutter modes. After looking at the Sony features, I suspect they also have a secret paparazzi version with a Nip-Slip Detection mode….

Sony Labs… Working for you!

There is relatively little useful information out there about what exactly these food porn shooting modes do. From what I can glean from a variety of sources, they are all macro focus modes, letting you practically crawl into the glass or plate. All seem to bump up the saturation of pictures until you can smell the herbs. Each also has some form of white-balance correction, some automatic, some on-screen, to make sure your Pisco Sour doesn’t come out blue. The fact that you have to work so hard to find useful info about this feature tells me it isn’t going to turn you into Sara Remington with the push of a button. But if it gives you the courage, or just the impetus, to do more food or cocktail shooting, that’s great.

Or is it?

It is one thing for us to take pictures of our own drinks (or dishes) to share on the web or with friends. It is a great way to add interest, promote, inform, and learn. But the LAT article focuses on what it calls the Food Paparazzi. In the picture above, a blogger named Misty Oka is snapping away in the middle of a restaurant. It’s a narrow, crowded space, and she is in the way of servers trying to work and patrons who might also like to see the show kitchen. I’m smacking her around a little because, well, she deserves it a little, but I did check out her blog Noms, Not Bombs. She has a nice chatty style of blogging, an interesting take on the LA food scene, and lots of photos. If I lived in Southern California, I’d probably add it to my RSS reader. (Misty, if it was the Times who suggested you stand there, I apologize.) And as an aside, would it have killed the Times to embed a link to Misty’s blog? This standard practice by mainstream media outlets dwarfs any and all of the outrageous behavior outlined below.
UPDATE: I contacted Misty about this piece, and she points out, as the Times does not, that the picture was taken during a closed media-only event. She been standing like that in a regular restaurant open for regular business. You can read more from her down in the first comment below.)

The article contains some really obnoxious behaviors which are apparently becoming common. If I may channel my inner Jeff Foxorthy….

• If nearby patrons are asking to be reseated elsewhere because of flashes or shutter noises emanating from in front of your face… you might be a douchebag.
• If your complex meal takes an hour longer than it should (with others stewing in the bar) because you are doing a five minute photoshoot with each amuse bouche and intermezzo… you might be a douchebag.
• If you have a party of two, but reserve a table for four to accommodate your tripod(!)… you are most definitely a douchebag.

(All tales from the Time article)

Now, most of this behavior is not bloggers or other (allegedly) higher forms of journalists. But we are not immune from idiocy either.

So this month, on the eve of Ludo Bites’ grand opening, Lefebvre happily cooked a private dinner for 18 food bloggers. His wife set up a portable light box in a corner of the dining room.

Even before the bread plates hit the table, the crowd went nuts. As each new dish arrived, the bloggers rushed over to the light box to get the shot, then returned to their seats.

Lefebvre fought for patience. His forehead wrinkled in frustration as he watched the steam dissipate off bowls of escargot and plates of fish.

Finally, he broke.

Respect the food! The salmon’s getting cold! Lefebvre bellowed.

The crowd turned to stare. Six people pointed cameras at the chef. Click.

I realize that they were there for promotional purposes, but come on. Eat your serving first, then go photograph the samples! Priorities. (Here’s Misty’s story on that event, by the way. She sensibly only seems to have visited the light box once.)

Can I make a few suggestions about common sense camera etiquette in bars and restaurants? These aren’t tips. Virtually every one will make it harder for you to get the shot you want. But they will cut down the amount of hate in the world… hate directed at you.

• No flash. Ever. It is distracting, occasionally blinding, and seldom improves your shot anyway.
• Keep your butt in your seat. Learn to take shots from where you sit. Your camera has a macro setting (yes, it does). This will help you get acceptable shots without your needing to impede and/or direct traffic.
• If the place is quiet, turn off the sound effects. If you are shooting real film, with a real shutter… just keep being awesome.
• Do not take pictures that have random, unknown patrons in them. Respect people’s privacy.
• Don’t even give the impression that your pictures might include other patrons. Whether your photos actually invade someone else’s privacy or not, if that person thinks they do… damage done.
• The same goes for pictures of the staff, unless you ask first.
• Consider the fellow diners in your own party as well. Do not insist on everyone waiting to until you have gotten your shots of everyone’s dishes before they dig in. Unless you want to eat alone in the future.

Yes, I know I haven’t been posting much this month. Call it a hangover from TIki Month. I even have lots of stuff to write about, but no motivation to write anything worth reading.
I’ve got Liquor Fairy tales to tell of Ardmore scotch, Treaty Oak rum, Original Herbsaint, and a poker-related tale of Firefly Sweet-Tea vodka. I’ve got politics to discuss. But I’m suffering from ennui. Wish me luck in getting my blog-groove back.
In short, I got nothing.
So here’s a picture of a bunny with a waffle on it’s head:

On the Eleventh Day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:

Eleven Bloggers Blogging,
Ten Cajuns Shaking,
Nine Buddies Boozing,
Eight Barmaids Serving,
Seven Blues a Blazing,
Six Glasses Gleaming,
Five… Golden… Rums!
Four Cocktail Books,
Three French 75s,
Two Jars of Olives,
And a Shaker Full of Martinis!