A Tale Of Cocktails #1

Kir Imperial
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Ingredients

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4 1/2 oz champagne

1/2 oz chambord
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Taste: 7
Look: 6

Cost: 6
Name: 8
Prep: 10

Alcohol: 4

Overall: 6.7

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General Comments: Fairly impressive, overall.  It's certainly easy to make - indeed nothing's ever gonna get easier until I persuade the council to install taps providing hot and cold running pina colada.  It also looks quite nice, albeit a little bit dull (the price you pay for ease of preparation, I guess).  The same is true of the taste, really.  It's raspberry-tinged taste is genuinely quite nice, but a bit uninspiring; you can get sparkling fruit wines that are very similar, which is a little disappointing, especially considering the cost.

On the other hand, it did get The Other Half drunk pretty quickly, so it has that going for it.  Nice name, too.

A Tale Of Cocktails

It's been a long while since we came to the end of the Shake Experiment, so it's high time we ran through another set of drinks in a freakishly anal manner.

And, as you can probably tell from this post's title (Chuck wanted me to go with "A Tale of Cocks", but then she's young, and so terribly innocent).  I shall post the first result tomorrow, but let's set up the ground rules first.  Each drink will be rated in six categories: taste, appearance, cost (calculated as 10 - cost per glass), difficulty in preparation and alcoholic content (where 0 is alcohol free, 10 is over 40%), and the degree to which their name amuses or disgusts me. 

They'll also get an overall score, but at the urging of SpaceSquid Senior, I'll be using a weighted average; taste getting three votes and appearance and cost two each.

Let the quest to find a superior alternative to Woo Woo commence!

The Rise And Fall Of The Norman Empire

Chris B and I recorded our latest podcast on Thursday - coming soon to an internet near you - on the subject of Norman Osborn.  In the end, though, I figured my notes were complete enough to forge into a post.

I've been trying to decide for a little while exactly what makes Osborn so interesting, and I think a lot of it boils down to a single question: What happens when you take a villain and make his success contingent on being heroic?

Your Friday Dose Of WTF

Seriously, what is going on here?  I'm deeply confused, and that's with full knowledge of what a Dalek looks like.

Confederates, Extortion And Doom

I just thought I'd share two things I've taken away from Mother Jones this week, which are kind of related.  First up, the world's most terrifying book since Babara Cartland passed away :

I know what the title really is, but I can't help reading that mish-mash as "Confederate Coloring and Book Learning".  ll you need do is drop that last "g" and you have a perfect encapsulation of the kind of people liable to want to buy this book for their kids.

Probably in the grand scheme of indoctrination this is far less worrying than Texas re-writing their school history text books to excise progressives to make room for more racists, but this ties into a lot of things that I've been seeing lately, a concerted attempt by various Southerners to rehabilitate the notion of the Confederacy by trying to redefine it (in fairness, such attempts have been going on for a loooooooong time).  Ta Nehisi Coates has a particularly good post on this up here.

Ultimately, of course, it's the same problem we see every time with aspects of the American Right (and aspects of the British Right, and to be fair the Left as well, though generally speaking progressive lunatics aren't generally elected into office).  If someone wanted to make the case that the Confederacy wasn't universally about continuing slavery (it wasn't), that it had issues with the US beyond slavery (it did), and that the Union Army hardly acted as paragons of virtue and racial tolerance (which it didn't), then that's worth a conversation.  But that's just too damn complicated for these people.  Too nuanced.  All they can manage is that slavery is bad, but the Confederacy was good, therefore the Confederacy can't have been about slavery.

And how have those that formed, ran and lost the CSA learned their lesson in the last 155 years?  Well, they've switched parties, but otherwise: not very well.  Tax cuts are always good, the President and a majority of Congress don't want to let the tax cuts expire, so the President and a majority of Congress must be stopped at all costs.

I'm still fairly new to this game, but I've never seen anything like this.  Nothing - literally nothing - will be allowed to reach a vote in the Senate unless the tax cuts are renewed.  The Democrats have already agreed to allow the cuts to continue on the middle class, but of course the Republicans have refused that compromise.  The rich must continue to enjoy the Bush tax cuts, or the government gets it. The filibuster has now officially progressed from emergency measure to standard procedure to a method of extortion.

Note as well that this is signed by every single Republican Senator.  Every. Single. One.  In a year when the GOP are screaming about fiscal responsibility (to the point of wanting to cut unemployment benefits), the entire Senate minority have determined that there can be no action taken by the federal government - including action to reduce the deficit - unless the tax cuts which contributed to a significant proportion of that deficit continue.

It's almost impossible at this point not to subscribe wholesale to Tom Friedman and Kevin Drum's incredibly cynical takes on the whole situation.  America is pretty much screwed, and nobody who has any chance of stopping it seems to have any interest in trying.

Quz 9

Have at it, people! No bonus round this time, I fear; since it involved spelling. (Edit: I should have mentioned, the top five scores last night were 33, 33, 30, 28, 28.  That's what you have to beat.)

Round 1: Words

(Each word is made up entirely of Roman numerals)

1. Amiably gentle or temperate in taste, sensation, or feeling or behaviour toward others. MILD

2. A perennial herb, sole member of the genus Anethum, with both leaves and seeds that are used in preparing food. DILL

3.  To imitate or copy in action, speech, or appearance. MIMIC

4.  Enraged or furiously angry. LIVID

5.  Of or pertaining to a city or to citizenship. CIVIC\CIVIL

Round 2: Yellow

1. Which fictional villain with a distinctive moustache has appeared extensively in cinema, television, radio and comic books since being created in the 1930s – despite unfortunate racist overtones - and has been described as “The yellow peril incarnate in one man”? Fu Manchu

2. What was the name of Coldplay’s debut album, from which their second single “Yellow” was taken, giving the band their first top ten hit? "Parachutes"

3. Which DC Comics superhero has a magical “power ring” which has almost infinite potential, but which for many years was entirely powerless against yellow objects? Green Lantern

4. What reason did Frenchman Louis Bobet offer when he initially refused to wear the first yellow jersey he had won in the Tour de France? The jersey included synthetic fibres, and Bobet demanded pure wool

5. Authorised in 1853 and first completed in 1884, which London Underground line is coloured yellow on maps of the system? Circle

Round 3: Insults

1. Which politician did the late comedian Linda Smith describe as "Satan's bearded folk-singer"? David Blunkett

2. According to the French knights in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, "your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of..."what? Elderberries

3. Which poet reputedly died of an insult to brain caused by eighteen straight whiskies on top of serious pneumonia? Dylan Thomas

4. Which crime under defamation law is defined as a harmful statement in a transitory form, especially speech? Slander

5. Which politician, when accused of drunkenness by MP Bessie Braddock, replied, "Bessie, you're ugly; but tomorrow morning, I shall be sober."? Winston Churchill

 

Round 4: Women in song

(For each question I want to know the name of the woman being sung about.)

1.”Died in the church and was buried along with her name.” Elanor Rigby

2. ”Jubilation, she loves me again; I fall on the floor and I’m laughing.” Cecilia

3. “Well I’m not dumb but I can’t understand why she walked like a woman but talked like a man.” Lola

4. “You had the grace to hold yourself while those around you crawled.” Norma Jean (Marilyn Monroe)

5. “As she deceived me I watched and went out of my mind.” Delilah

Round 5: Strange Ends

1. Which American actress and sex-symbol of the ‘50s died when her car passed under a suddenly-breaking trailer, crushing her head? Jayne Mansfield

2. Which philosopher was found guilty of corrupting the minds of youth and subsequently sentenced to death by drinking a mixture including hemlock? Socrates

3. Hanged in 1829 for his role in a spate of grisly murders, what became of the body of William Burke? His body was given over to medical science

4. Which animal finally put an end to famous snake-botherer and crocodile-enrager Steve Irwin? A sting-ray

5. After surviving a plunge down Niagara Falls in a barrel, Englishman Bobby Leach died in another fall after slipping on what? Orange peel

Round 6: Bavaria

1. The Bavarian flag and its lesser coat of arms both consist of which two colours? Blue and white

2. Bavaria shares a border with Switzerland across lake Constance, but which two other Europeans countries does the region border? Austria and the Czech Republic

3. Which team did Bayern Munich beat 4-0 in Berlin this May to win the German Cup? Werner Bremen

4. Protected until recently by a “purity law” first established in Munich in 1487, which drink is consumed in Bavaria at an average annual rate of 170 litres per person? Beer

5. Which member of the Christian Social Union and Minister President in Bavaria died in 1988, and gave his name to the newly constructed Munich Airport in 1992? Franz Josef Strauss

GK Round

1. (Harry Potter) What kind of dragon is Norbert? Norwegian Ridgeback

2. Which is the only number which when written in English has its letters in alphabetical order? Forty

3. Proteus, Despina and Thalassa are all moons of which planet? Neptune

4. Which South American capital city has the distinction of being the highest capital city above sea level in the world? La Paz

5. Which element has the chemical symbol W? Tungsten

6. According to popular legend, whose final words were “Pardon monsieur”, as they stepped on their executioner’s foot on the way to their death? Marie Antoinette

7. Which board game was originally released in France in 1957 as La Conquete du Monde? "Risk"

8. Which former majority leader of the US House of Representatives was convicted by a Texas court this week for money laundering? Tom DeLay

9. Robert Thompson Craftsmen Ltd produces oak furniture, each piece of which famously includes a carving of what animal? Mouse

10. What kind of animal is a Devil’s coach-horse? Insect (beetle)

Best Research Ever

I briefly mentioned this before, but the main plus point to my week in Munich is that it allowed me to fulfil a life-long dream and apply genuine maths research to the X-Men (note that I didn't claim this dream wasn't sad, merely long-held).

Because I care, and I know you're interested, I shall now display the results of my labours to the world.  Essentially, I've used my New Maths (TM) to create a method of classifying the X-Men into two groups: alive (A) and dead (D).  The actual method is too complicated to repeat here, but here's a small taste.  Simply choose your favourite X-Man, follow the prompts, and discover whether or not they've shuffled off this mortal coil.

Obviously, there are problems.  Deciding how many times a character has "died" would be worth another SS v X series in itself. The issue count only includes X-Men (as oppose to UXM) issues if the character didn't appear in UXM that month, and furthermore only counts when a character was on the roster, rather than enjoying a guest appearance.  Also, this tree was created using data from 20th Century X-Men, so it might not work too well with some of the new additions (plus, the presentation is shit, but it's late on Tuesday night and I'm passed the point of caring). 

One thing that isn't a bug, rather a feature, is the fact that sometimes the tree essentially just shrugs its shoulders and returns "dunno" (?).  My speciality lies in differentiating between situations when a single answer can be justified, and when it can't.

In any case, it's something for you to mess around with on a particularly slow day.