Friday the 13th

Aug 14, 2010 | Bourbon

Bulleit BourbonYesterday was Friday the 13th, but one thing you never encounter around our place is any friggatriskaidekaphobia. (That’s fear of Friday the 13th for those of you who don’t read Wikipedia.) Why?

Many years ago, lost in the mists of time* we got married on the 13th. Since then we’ve always celebrated the 13th as our anniversary, regardless of month or year. It’s usually a quiet celebration consisting of wishing each other a happy anniversary in the morning and later, in the early evening, sitting somewhere out on our vast estate with several fingers of single malt, or Irish whiskey or a good bourbon and chatting while the sun goes down and the woods transition from day-shift activity to night-shift activity.

As luck would have it, Friday the 13th always falls on our anniversary, and therefore has just never been able to achieve any mental traction.

Bulleit Bourbon bottleSo to the business at hand and one of the raisin detras of this blog which is to occasionally discuss bourbon: Last evening we celebrated with a glass of Bulleit Bourbon “Frontier Whiskey.” Regardless of taste Bulleit would get high marks just on packaging alone, given its medicine-flask-raised-letters bottle, complete with cork top and old fashioned label. We have no pretensions to connoisseurship around here, but this is how an expert described Bulleit: “smells include rye toast, snack crackers, and brown butter… palate entry is remarkably savory, corny sweet, and nearly honey-like… attractive tastes of buttered popcorn, brown sugar, and nougat expand. Finishes with a spurt of fire and lots of long, corny/grainy tastes.” [from F. Paul Pacult’s Whiskey Review, iWhiskey iPhone app]

We, on the other hand, tend to rate bourbons on a binary scale of zero-to-one, one being good and zero being void of all goodness and undeserving to exist in this universe. We gave Bulleit a one.
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*I really wanted to write “in the midst of time” but lost my nerve figuring most folks would assume it was a typo instead of a brilliant play on words. Might be a good title for a sci-fi novel. Oops, a quick visit to Google indicates that it already is the title of a new age sci-fi novel. Plus there’s a number of blogs that have already used the phrase, some seemingly aware of the word-play conceit, but others just blissfully ignorant of their mistake. So never mind.

So you think you can do performance art

Aug 11, 2010 | Art

If the Ross Sisters would have performed at PS122 circa 1987 they’d probably be regulars in Vegas a la Blue Man Group today. Certainly someone would have called me at High Performance magazine and said, “you really really really need to write about this group.” If they were performing today it would probably have a seriously negative impact on Lady Gaga’s career (assuming a contemporary audience would believe there was no computer manipulation involved). Anyway, I guess this is what sisters did before cell phones and texting. (Courtesy kottke.org)

Mushrooms

Aug 8, 2010 | Art

Time of the year for all the interesting mushrooms to pop up around the place. Here’s a favorite:

red mushrooms openThese cherry red mushrooms open to about the size of a giant cookie from a fancy coffee shop. They push out of the ground looking like a big red egg before they open.

cherryredmushroomheadUnderneath they turn a bright buttery yellow. It was one of these mushrooms that served as the basis for this digital artwork that hangs on the front of our garage.

mushroomframedThere’s also this red, darker, blood red mushroom. Haven’t messed with it yet.

deepredmushroom

The Early Years 2

Aug 5, 2010 | Art, Dogs

I did my first (perhaps only) graphic novel back around 1958. It was titled “Tip and Jack.” I remember wanting to name the dog “Gratuity” but decided that “Tip” fit better with the minimalist nature of the project. One critic suggested Tip was actually a small pony. I’m not averse to the ambiguity.

Tip and Jack

Tip Be Good

You're not good Tip

You are a good dog.

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