Archive for the ‘Mixology’ Category

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Obit watch: January 5, 2024.

Friday, January 5th, 2024

Glynis Johns. IMDB.

Wow:

A year later [1963 – DB], she starred in her own short-lived CBS sitcom, Glynis, in which she played a mystery writer and amateur sleuth, and later, she was Lady Penelope Peasoup opposite Rudy Vallee as Lord Marmaduke Ffogg on the last season of ABC’s Batman.

Yes, she did do a guest spot on “Murder She Wrote“.

Wow^2: she was “Sister Anne” in “Nukie“.

Stephen Sondheim wrote “Send in the Clowns”, in “A Little Night Music”, with shorter phrasing to accommodate her. Although her voice, alternately described as smoky or silvery or wistful, was lovely, she was unable to sustain notes for long.

Be that as it may, I find her performance of that song incredibly haunting.

Maj. Mike Sadler has passed away at 103.

Mr. Sadler was one of the first recruits and the last surviving member of the S.A.S. from the year of its founding, 1941. Like a navigator at sea, he used stars, sun and instruments to cross expanses of the Libyan Desert, a wasteland almost the size of India, whose shifting, windblown dunes can be as changing and featureless as an ocean.
Compared with the commandos he guided on truck and jeep convoys — volunteer daredevils who crept onto Nazi airfields; attached time bombs to Messerschmitt fighters, Stuka dive bombers, fuel dumps and pilot quarters; then sped away as explosions roared behind — Mr. Sadler was no hero in the usual sense. Comrades said he might not have fired a single shot at the enemy in North Africa.
But he got his men to the targets — and out again. Without him, they said, the commandos could not have crossed hundreds of miles of desert, found enemy bases on the Mediterranean Coast, destroyed more than 325 aircraft, blown up ammunition and supply dumps, killed hundreds of German and Italian soldiers and pilots, or found their way back to hidden bases.

…

Mr. Sadler was intrigued by desert navigation. “What amazed me,” he told Mr. Rayment, “was that even with the vast, featureless expanses of the desert, a good navigator could pinpoint his exact location by using a theodolite, an air almanac and air navigational tables, and having a good knowledge of the stars.”
He spent weeks studying navigation techniques, including use of a theodolite — a telescopic device, with two perpendicular axes, used mainly by surveyors, for measuring angles in the horizontal and vertical planes. It was not unlike the sextant used by mariners to fix positions at sea.

…

In one of the epic stories of the North Africa campaign, Mr. Sadler and two sergeants escaped from the Germans and, with only a goatskin carrying brackish water, crossed 110 miles of desert on foot in five days. Hostile Bedouins stoned them, bloodying their heads, and stole their warm clothing, leaving them to shiver through freezing nights.
Starving except for a few dates, they were exposed to windblown sands that scraped them like sandpaper, a relentless sun that burned and blistered their faces, and swarms of flies that enveloped and tormented them. On the hot sands, their feet were masses of blisters after a few days. When they finally reached Free French lines, they looked like half-dead castaways in rags.
“We had long hair and beards and were looking very bedraggled,” Mr. Sadler recalled. “Our feet were in tatters — I don’t think we looked very much like soldiers.”

…

After his North Africa adventures as a desert navigator, Mr. Sadler returned to England and in 1944 parachuted into France after the Allied invasion of Normandy. He participated in sabotage operations against German occupation forces and won the Military Cross for bravery in action behind enemy lines.

Anthony Dias Blue, noted wine guy.

Mr. Blue was no populist. But he believed that good wine needn’t be expensive or difficult to appreciate; all that people needed, he said, was a guide, like him, to show them what was worth buying.

Posted in Heroism, History, Mixology, Movies, Nazis, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 9, 2023.

Monday, October 9th, 2023

Ellsworth Johnson passed away on September 30. He was 100.

Mr. Johnson was a member of one of the Operations Groups of the Office of Strategic Services in WWII. He was originally trained as a medic:

“My disappointment at being a medic was great,” he wrote in a memoir, “Behind Enemy Lines: The O.S.S. in World War II” (2019). “I knew that surgical training would at least keep me out of a ward where I could expect to be no more than a bedpan jockey.”
He drew a distinction between participating on the field of combat and treating its victims after the battle.
“I wanted to get into the fight,” he said in a television interview. “I didn’t want to see the results of the fight.”

…

In August 1944, he parachuted from the belly of a B-24 bomber 400 miles behind German lines to harass enemy troops and feed intelligence to London as the Allies were poised to invade southern France. His team and the French Resistance captured a vital dam and its hydroelectric power plant after forcing the German garrison guarding it to flee.
After serving in France for about a month, he and many of his comrades chose to transfer to the Pacific Theater as members of an Operations Group rather than be absorbed into the regular Army.
Joining recently trained Chinese paratroopers, Mr. Johnson and other Americans, all serving officially as advisers, jumped some 600 miles into Japanese-occupied territory in the summer of 1945.
“We learned to live under the noses of the enemy,” he wrote.
They successfully intercepted enemy supply lines and communications and inflicted casualties in an unsuccessful attempt to retake a town.

…

Technician 4th Grade Johnson (he was commissioned an honorary colonel in the Chinese Nationalist Army) received two Bronze Stars. Office of Strategic Services veterans were also awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for intelligence and special operations during World War II. His missions remained classified until 1995, after which the Army determined that he met the requirements to join the Special Forces Regiment.

The OSS Operations Groups are considered a precursor to today’s Special Forces.

His death was confirmed by his daughter-in-law, Anna Johnson. It came four weeks after he was presented with an Army Special Forces tab and a Green Beret in a ceremony at the assisted living facility where he lived near Grand Rapids, Mich.
“This is an extremely rare event and, quite frankly, the last of its kind that will ever occur,” Major Russell M. Gordon, the director of public affairs for the 1st Special Forces Command, said of the ceremony.
And Maj. Gen. Patrick Roberson, the deputy commanding general of the Army Special Operations Command, said during the event: “Everything that he did in 1944 — we model ourselves on in our training and the operations that we conduct. It’s our origin story.”

Murray Stenson, cocktail guy.

He shunned attention, even as his fame grew alongside the rise of craft cocktails in the 2000s. When he was named the best bartender in America in 2010 by Tales of the Cocktail, an annual conference in New Orleans, he refused to go to the ceremony. He said he had a shift to fill.

…

Mr. Stenson was among a small group of bartenders who as early as the 1980s began to push back against the sickly sweet concoctions of the 1970s — Sex on the Beach, Harvey Wallbanger — in favor of elevated drinks made with quality ingredients, a seemingly obvious approach that was almost unthinkable when he began.

…

He was known, above all, for resurrecting a forgotten pre-Prohibition cocktail called the Last Word, made with equal parts gin, lime juice, green chartreuse and maraschino liqueur. He discovered it in a 1951 cocktail book and added it to his menu, and within a few years it had not only spread nationwide but had become the archetype for a whole genre of modern classic cocktails, like the Paper Plane and the Gin Blossom.

I’ve made myself a Last Word a couple of times, and I’ve had them when I’m out and about and drinking. The ones I make at home seem just a little sweet to my taste: the ones I get elsewhere I think are better balanced. If I can find Mr. Stenson’s recipe, I’ll compare it to the ones I’m using.

Mr. Stenson did not consider himself a mentor. He did not write books or become a highly paid brand ambassador, as many successful bartenders do, especially once they reach middle age and their bodies start to rebel against hours of constant standing. Well into his 60s, and even after open-heart surgery in 2012, he worked up to seven nights a week.
“I enjoy being behind the bar,” he told Imbibe magazine in 2012. “That’s where you meet all the really interesting people.”

Posted in Heroism, Mixology, Obits | Comments Closed

Cereal experiments lame.

Monday, January 2nd, 2023

Mike the Musicologist and I have a tradition, dating back quite a while: if we find ourselves in a grocery store, we go look in the cereal aisle…for silly cereals.

Over the weekend, we went by a WalMart Supercenter because we were looking for a specific silly cereal.

Yes, that is “Elf on the Shelf Hot Cocoa Cereal with Marshmallows”. That was the only flavor (and the only box) WalMart had, but there’s also “Sugar Cookie” flavor and “North Pole Snow Creme” flavor.

Other things that we found, but did not buy, because we’re not that silly.

Kellogg’s Frosted Pandora Flakes. Do you suppose that anyone at Kellogg’s thought about the symbolism of opening a box labeled “Pandora”?

“Wendy’s Frosty Chocolatey Cereal With Wendy’s Frosty Flavor”. “Frosty” is not a flavor.

“IHOP Mini Pancake Cereal”, for when you want the taste of IHOP pancakes, but don’t want to deal with the Mongolian fire drill that IHOP has become.

Not cereals, but on the same aisle:

“Mrs. Butterworth’s Fruity Pebbles Flavored Syrup” and “Cap’n Crunch’s Ocean Blue Artificially Maple Flavored Syrup”. There are so many things wrong with these, I can’t even.

I’ll throw in one more photo from the weekend that’s totally unrelated. I like the way this came out, though I did manually adjust the exposure and crop. (I thought it came out a little dark: it was more overcast than I thought it was.)

Christmas “tree” at Garrison Brothers Distillery in Hye, Texas.

Posted in Christmas, Food, Mixology | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 15, 2022.

Thursday, September 15th, 2022

Mark Miller. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “Adam-12”, “The Name of the Game”, and “Harry O”.

Fred Franzia, cheap wine guy.

His most famous acquisition was Charles Shaw, a label with a strong reputation among winemakers that filed for bankruptcy in 1995. In 2002, Mr. Franzia started selling the wine exclusively at Trader Joe’s for $1.99 a bottle (in some cities, it can now cost up to $3.99). The wine became affectionately known as Two-Buck Chuck.
The company says it has sold over 1 billion bottles.

Two Buck Chuck is now $3.99? Thanks, Joe Biden!

(Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon: Tales of a Soviet Scientist, by Iosif Shkolovsky. Vodka bottles and wine bottles are pretty similar in size, right?)

Posted in 1970s, Books, Mixology, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Mixed drink note.

Sunday, May 29th, 2022

I could have out this in an earlier entry, but, well, I forgot.

After dinner at Mala, Mike the Musicologist stopped off at Anvil Bar and Refuge for a drink. Because it was in the neighborhood, I’d heard about it but never been, and it was a weeknight so the crowd was more manageable.

One of the classic cocktails on their list – which I had not heard of before – was the Up to Date. This cocktail is credited to Hugo Ensslin – who I had also not heard of before – around 1917.

Mr. Ensslin was an interesting guy. In 1917 (or 1916 – sources differ) he published a book called Recipes for Mixed Drinks, which many people consider the last gasp of cocktail culture before Prohibition. Mr. Ensslin was a hotel bartender, and Mixed Drinks is mostly based on his hotel recipes, not on ones he got from other people. It is supposed to have been a big influence on people like Harry Craddock (of The Savoy Cocktail Book).

There was a reprint edition a few years back (WP review) that seems to still be in print. But there’s also a scanned version online.

It was a good cocktail. I liked the balance, and may try making one at home at some point.

Also: The Chanticleer Society, though they aren’t updating as much as I would like them to.

Also also: the Sazerac at the Rainbow Lodge is very good.

Posted in Bookmarks, Books, Mixology | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 21, 2021.

Monday, June 21st, 2021

George Stranahan, colorful figure.

His family owned the Champion Spark Plug company, so he had family money. He got a PhD in physics, and spent a lot of time doing physics in the late 1950s.

Staring at a blank page one afternoon in 1959, he made a discovery: You can’t do physics alone. You need someone to talk to. Mr. Stranahan dreamed of creating a physics think tank in the Rockies.

So he did:

The Aspen Center for Physics was born. It proved pivotal in the development of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, for a long time the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, and the formulation of string theory, regarded by many physicists as the most promising candidate for a “theory of everything” that would explain all the universe’s physical phenomena.
Sixty-six Nobel laureates have visited. “I’m convinced all the best physics gets done there,” Tony Leggett, one of those Nobelists, wrote on the center’s website. Another, Brian Schmidt, called the center “the place I have gone to expand my horizons for the entirety of my career.”

He cut back on his involvement in physics in 1972.

…in 1980, he opened a bar near Aspen, the Woody Creek Tavern, where he spent several years mixing drinks while also pitching in for humbler tasks like janitorial work. His daughter Molly Stranahan remembered him as a skilled cooker of soup for customers, including ranchers and cowboys.

He went on to found Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey (which I have heard good things about, but never been able to find) and Flying Dog beer.

As of last year, Flying Dog was the 35th-biggest craft brewing company in the United States, according to the Brewers Association. In 2010, a “beer panel” convened by the New York Times food critics Eric Asimov and Florence Fabricant to rank pale ales declared Flying Dog’s Doggie Style Classic its “consensus favorite.”

He also did some ranching:

In 1990, Mr. Stranahan’s Limousin bull Turbo was declared grand champion at the 1990 National Western Stock Show, a highly regarded trade show. The price for a shot of Turbo’s semen rose to $15,000.
He quit the business not long after. Even with Turbo, Mr. Stranahan estimated that he lost $1 million during 18 years of ranching.

Going back for a minute, if the Woody Creek Tavern rings a bell with you, yes, that was Hunter S. Thompson’s hangout. Mr. Stranahan and Hunter were close friends.

Mr. Thompson either leased or bought the land he lived on from Mr. Stranahan. The details of the arrangement, intended to be easy on Mr. Thompson, appear to have been lost in a haze of friendship and misbehavior. The first time the two men met, Mr. Stranahan told Vanity Fair in 2003, they took mescaline that hit him “like a sledgehammer.”
“We talked a lot, drank a lot and dynamited a lot,” Mr. Stranahan said about their friendship in a 2008 interview with The Denver Post. “If you’re a rancher, you have access to dynamite.”

For the historical record: NYT obit for Frank Bonner.

Posted in 1970s, Explosives, Geek, History, Mixology, Obits, TV | 4 Comments »

Gin!

Saturday, June 12th, 2021

Happy World Gin Day!

(And hattip to Mike the Musicologist for pointing this out to me.)

In honor of WGD, I thought I’d post this: “How To Drink” covers The Last Word (as well as a non-gin variant made with mezcal).

I think The Last Word is an interesting cocktail, what with the whole Prohibition thing and “rediscovery” in the 21st Century. Plus: Chartreuse.

I mixed up one recently for my weekly happy hour based on Esquire’s recipe (and using Beefeater gin). The Chartreuse gives it an interesting herbal note, but, overall, I found it to be really sweet. It was almost too sweet for my palate, which is a rare thing for me. If I mix one up again, I might cut back on the maraschino liqueur: maybe 1/2 ounce instead of 3/4 ounce. But I recommend you try the recipes as written first. Your palate may vary.

Posted in Mixology | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 414

Wednesday, May 19th, 2021

Tonight is my happy hour night, so I thought I’d do some food and drink today.

Why don’t we start with gin, which I am nearly out of at the moment. I know, I should not have let my stock get this low…

“The London Gin Craze and Beyond”.

Bonus #1: I’m trolling a little here. I have a close family member who hates onions as much as I hate tomatoes. So…

“Why are sweet onions sweet? Can you really eat Vidalia onions like apples?”

Bonus #2: I touched on Tiki history recently, but only from the Donn the Beachcomber perspective. Here’s one from a different source that also covers Trader Vic and Mariano Licudine.

Thinking about it, I may have just enough gin to mix a Suffering Bastard tonight. I believe we have everything else. Except perhaps limes.

Posted in Food, History, Mixology | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 392

Tuesday, April 27th, 2021

Well, I threatened some mixology, and it has been a while since I’ve done anything with cocktails…

Two videos on the gin and tonic, with associated discussion on malaria and quinine: the “How to Drink” guy:

And Alton Brown:

Bonus, also from the “How to Drink” guy: “A history of Tiki: Donn the Beachcomber”. Personally, I find the backstory behind Donn Beach interesting, which is why I’m linking the video here. The cocktails strike me as sort of fussy and requiring various specialized syrups and ingredients (“Velvet Falernum”, “Fassionola Syrup”), which you may be able to get mail order (if the store isn’t sold out). Frankly, I like cocktails that I can make from a relatively small number of ingredients that are available locally.

The “Missionary’s Downfall” does sound feasible, though I don’t generally keep peach brandy around.

Posted in History, Mixology | 1 Comment »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 316

Wednesday, February 10th, 2021

I thought I’d start out today with a vintage promo video from General Tire, “Car Tires, The Loaded Gun”.

You can skip over the last four or so minutes of this (it is only eight minutes long) but I wanted to highlight it here because…that first minute and 30 seconds. Wow. That was…unexpected.

For something completely different from “The 8-Bit Guy”, going out to the young folks in my audience: “How Telephone Phreaking Worked”. I’ve set the embed to start at about the 4:15 mark to skip over all the introductory material (videos of vintage computers, videos of the presenter signing things, etc.)

And for something else, also completely different: “How To Make Potato Vodka”. This is more for informational purposes than “how-to” purposes, though if you do happen to have a still just lying around in your garage…or, I guess, the skills to improvise one out of parts without poisoning yourself with lead…

Bonus #3: “How to Taste Whisky with Richard Paterson” part 1:

And part 2:

Posted in History, Mixology | 3 Comments »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 308

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2021

There’s a channel called “Tech Ingredients” that features a variety of interesting stuff.

This is slightly on the long side, but I watched it last night and found it oddly compelling: “Distilling ALCOHOL With Our New Reflux Still!”

I also generally don’t like videos that focus on a specific product, but in this case, the video is less about the specific reflux still and more about the general workings of one, including things like the design of the bubble plates and the dephlegmator.

Bonus video #1: Previously from “Tech Ingredients”, “Banana Brandy – Making Ugandan Waragi (Moonshine)”.

Bonus video #2: This also appeals to my geek instincts, but doesn’t involve booze: “Jet Engine Thrust Test – Fuel Experiment (Jet-A vs Diesel vs BioDiesel vs HydroDiesel)”. The guy built his own dynamometer, and then tested these fuels to see which one produces the most thrust.

I’m also a sucker for small jet engines.

Posted in Geek, History, Mixology | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 286

Monday, January 11th, 2021

I have another doctor’s appointment today (actually, two) so I’m serving up a variety platter based on some recent events.

It snowed here yesterday. Seriously, snowed. For several hours. In Texas.

It is supposed to be pretty cold today, too, so how about a refreshing cold weather drink recipe?

This recipe is different from the one given in How To Archer, specifically the addition of Creme de Cacao and Crème de menthe. (Also, eight ounces of peppermint schnapps to 12 ounces of hot chocolate sounds like a really good way to get messed up. So I’d recommend drinking these when you don’t have to go anywhere.) I should have picked up some schnapps, Creme de Cacao, and Crème de menthe when I was out…

We watched “Tombstone” Saturday night. Spoiler: I think we all rather liked it. However, me being who I am and the rest of us being who we are (the kind of people who have the Internet Movie Firearms Database open on their phones while we watch), of course I ended up discoursing on the Buntline Special during breaks.

This is a pretty good short video hitting some of the main points on the Buntline Special and Wyatt Earp.

Bonus: I don’t usually link to hickok45 since you should already be watching him. But I’m making an exception here because: “Cimarron Wyatt Earp Buntline Special” which is (as I understand it) an exact replica of the movie gun. And hickok45 also discourses some more on Buntline history.

Cimarron lists them in their 2020 catalog. Bud’s lists them as out of stock, but says they are a special order item.

It is kind of a good looking gun. And I want something in the Colt Single Action Army style. But:

  • I have the same problem hickock45 has with the 10″ barrel length: it just doesn’t seem handy.
  • I’m really not sure how well these guns are made (though hickock45 seems to think they’re okay).
  • What I really want in the SAA style is…an actual Colt Single Action Army in .45 Colt, not a substitute.

(I do have a New Frontier in .22 LR, but I’m thinking of trading that off. It seems surplus to needs, now that I have a Ruger Single-Six with both .22 LR and .22 Magnum cylinders.)

Side note: “Wyatt Earp and the Buntline Special Myth” from the Kansas Historical Quarterly.

…the late Raymond Thorp told a story about Wyatt Earp showing him a revolver in the late fall of 1914. At that time, he said, Wyatt carried a Colt S.A.A. with a 5-1/2-inch barrel. Thorp claimed Earp told him, “I don’t like a gun with a longer barrel. Sometimes an inch or two makes a difference when you want to jerk it quickly.”

Side note #2: Josephine Earp, which I also find interesting: especially the part about “I Married Wyatt Earp“.

I’ve written before about “The Devil At Your Heels”, the Canadian documentary about Ken Carter and his five-year attempt to do a one-mile jump over the St. Lawrence River.

For those of you who might have been wondering and didn’t check Wikipedia: “Ken Carter – Stuntman To The End”. Or: the rest of the story after the jump attempt.

Posted in Guns, History, Mixology, Movies, Photography | Comments Closed

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