Jello Shots

Today’s recipe: Jello Shots. You don’t have to be a frat bro to appreciate them. Basically, it takes 2 cups of water to make one package of Jello; just make it with 1 cup, then add a half-cup of booze and a half-cup of cold water to the thick hot goo, pour into small cups, and put them in the refrigerator overnight.

You can read about Jello Shot chemistry here, or watch a quick video. If you’re too genteel for gellified booze shooters, make some Port Wine Jelly.

More:

“The Science of Jello Shots,” Kevin Liu, Serious Eats

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Image (“Jello Shooter Night at The Bar of the Folies Bergère, after Edouard Manet”) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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Glasgow Bouncer University

Glasgow is known as an historic center of higher education and raucous pubs, so a school for bouncers just made sense.  A vintage BBC film clip.

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Please Daddy, Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas

“Please Daddy, Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas,” written by Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert, performed here by Alan Jackson. Many people think this song was written by John Denver, who first recorded it. The Decemberists also have a version.

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Seat Belts On The Bar Stools

“Seat Belts On The Bar Stools,” written by J.P. Mayton and Tom Valentine, recorded by Russ Mann, 1971.

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Georgetown Prep’s New Motto: ‘Amo Cerevisiam’ (‘I Like Beer’)

During his sworn testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh affirmed one thing as true: He really likes beer, and he liked it while he was a student at Georgetown Prep, the pricey Jesuit high school in the DC suburbs. Young Brett even listed himself as “Treasurer of the Keg City Club” in his high school yearbook. Surely Bill Shine, the former Fox News exec who is now White House Communications Director, advised him to declare his love of suds whenever those wine-sipping Democrats questioned him about his heavy drinking, since America’s Joe Sixpacks are Trump’s core voters.

One thing wrong with Brett Kavanaugh’s high school beer drinking: It wasn’t legal. As AP’s Alanna Durkin Richer points out, Maryland’s drinking age was raised to 21 in July 1982, when Brett Kavanaugh was a 17-year-old high school junior. He danced around this fact during committee testimony to avoid perjury, saying senior classmates could drink legally, but all this does is implicate the Georgetown Prep upperclassmen who bought him beer when he was 17.

Mr. Kavanaugh may have technically avoided perjuring himself about this one fact, if not several others, but he clearly has a rather distant relationship with the truth. Hey, we almost wrote this without using the phrase “sober as a judge.”

More:

“Brett Kavanaugh likes beer, but not questions about his drinking habits,” By Allyson Chiu, Washington Post

“Kavanaugh wrongly claims he could drink legally in Maryland,” Alanna Durkin Richer, Associated Press

“Brett Kavanaugh’s slippery answers about high school partying matter,” Matthew Yglesias, Vox

“At the Center of the Kavanaugh Accusations: Heavy Drinking,” Mike McIntire and Ben Protess, New York Times

“Many teens drink. Rich ones like Kavanaugh are more likely to abuse alcohol.” Suniya S. Luthar, Washington Post

“Trump on Kavanaugh: ‘I was surprised at how vocal he was about the fact that he likes beer,'” Caitlin Oprysko, Politico

“Kavanaugh’s High School, Georgetown Prep, Warned Parents in 1990 of ‘Sexual or Violent Behavior’ at Parties,” Jon Schwarz and Camille Baker, The Intercept

Passover Seder: Greek Symposium?

The Haggadah (הַגָּדָה‎) is a Jewish text that sets forth the order of the Passover ritual meal, the Seder.

“There’s a reason the haggadah feels goyish: Formally speaking, it’s Greek. It’s a Judaicized version of a Greek genre called ‘symposium literature’. Plato loved the form. So did Xenophon. The symposium enshrined the most appealing traits of the Hellenic personality: conviviality, Epicureanism, a love of good conversation.”

–”Platonic Form,” Judith Shulevitz, Tablet Magazine

The ancient Greek symposium (συμπόσιον) was a drinking party; drinking four glasses of wine is a Passover obligation. Diners are supposed to recline while they do so, just like the Greeks.

There’s a cute Passover tradition, breaking a piece of matzoh (unleavened bread) and hiding half of it. The bread can only be eaten at the end of the meal, after the family’s children discover it. That piece of bread has a funny name, afikomen, but its origin isn’t Hebrew. You guessed it, it’s Greek:

“In Greek, the word is epikomen and is made up of two smaller words: epi, which means after (as in an epilogue), and komos, which means a banquet or merrymaking, and is the same word that inspired the English word comedy. For centuries, Jews have taken afikomen to mean ‘that which comes after the meal,’ more commonly known, of course, as dessert.”

– “Breaking Matzah,” David K. Israel, Mental Floss

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Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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New Jersey: Don’t Drone While Drunk

Last Monday, before leaving the Governor’s office, New Jersey’s Chris Christie signed a law making it illegal to fly aerial drones while drunk. Anyone flying a drone in the Garden State with a blood alcohol content of 0.08 percent or higher or while drugged faces up to six months in jail, a $1,000 fine, or both. Flying drones near a prison or while pursuing wildlife is also banned.

Good luck with that. While all of Washington DC is a no-drone zone, nearly a hundred of the things flew over sensitive military sites in the area last summer, and a drunk off-duty federal intelligence employee crashed a hobby drone right onto the White House lawn in 2015.

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Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

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Please Daddy, Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas

“Please Daddy, Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas,” written by Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert, performed here by Alan Jackson. Many people think this song was written by John Denver, who first recorded it. The Decemberists also have a version.

____________

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Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

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Seis de Mayo

Last night, the 5th of May, millions of Americans commemorated the Mexican victory at the Battle of Puebla (1862) with volleys of shots — of tequila — bravura barrages of beer, and murderous margaritas. Unsurprisingly, this morning finds heads held hostage and stomachs seared from nacho napalm. Today’s Spanish vocabulary lesson: crudo means ” hangover.”

If you celebrated Cinco de Mayo with cerveza, celebrate Seis de Mayo this morning with el desayuno de los campeones, the Breakfast of Champions. The traditional Mexican hangover cure is menudo – tripe soup or stew.

Emergency hangover instructions issued by the Department of Homeland Security suggest a stockpile of canned menudo —Juanita’s,  Pico Pica, La Preferida, La Costeña, — but if you prefer fresh relief, have an ambulance deliver a few pounds of white honeycomb beef tripe (culin or pancita), posole (white hominy), dried or fresh chili peppers (ancho, poblano), onion, garlic, and maybe a nice calf’s foot (veal knuckle). Sure beats corn flakes.

Passover Seder: Greek Symposium?

The Haggadah (הַגָּדָה‎) is a Jewish text that sets forth the order of the Passover ritual meal, the Seder.

“There’s a reason the haggadah feels goyish: Formally speaking, it’s Greek. It’s a Judaicized version of a Greek genre called ‘symposium literature’. Plato loved the form. So did Xenophon. The symposium enshrined the most appealing traits of the Hellenic personality: conviviality, Epicureanism, a love of good conversation.”

–”Platonic Form,” Judith Shulevitz, Tablet Magazine

The ancient Greek symposium (συμπόσιον) was a drinking party; drinking four glasses of wine is a Passover obligation. Diners are supposed to recline while they do so, just like the Greeks.

There’s a cute Passover tradition, breaking a piece of matzoh (unleavened bread) and hiding half of it. The bread can only be eaten at the end of the meal, after the family’s children discover it. That piece of bread has a funny name, afikomen, but its origin isn’t Hebrew. You guessed it, it’s Greek:

“In Greek, the word is epikomen and is made up of two smaller words: epi, which means after (as in an epilogue), and komos, which means a banquet or merrymaking, and is the same word that inspired the English word comedy. For centuries, Jews have taken afikomen to mean ‘that which comes after the meal,’ more commonly known, of course, as dessert.”

– “Breaking Matzah,” David K. Israel, Mental Floss

_______________

Short Link: http://wp.me/p6sb6-nC6

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine