Uploaded on 25 Oct 2011
Part 8 of the 8-part series “The Past at Work”
Written & Presented by Anthony Burton
First broadcast 13th May 1980 (BBC 2)
See also: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/steamtrains/7309.shtml and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1718607/episodes
H/T to Eric Kirkland for the link.
Victor Davis Hanson on the limitations of #hashtag activism to combat real-world evil:
Nigeria’s homegrown, al-Qaeda linked militant group, Boko Haram, brags openly that it recently kidnapped about 300 young Nigerian girls. It boasts that it will sell them into sexual slavery.
Those terrorists have a long and unapologetic history of murdering kids who dare to enroll in school, and Christians in general. For years, Western aid groups have pleaded with the State Department to at least put Boko Haram on the official list of terrorist groups. But former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s team was reluctant to come down so harshly, in apparent worry that some might interpret such condemnation as potentially offensive to Islamic sensitivities.
Instead, Western elites now flood Facebook and Twitter with angry postings about Boko Haram — either in vain hopes that public outrage might deter the terrorists, or simply to feel better by loudly condemning the perpetrators.
[…]
But if we are postmodern and sensitive, what do we say or do about premodern racists with nuclear weapons, like the North Koreans?
A recent article from North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency suggested that President Obama “does not even have the basic appearances of a human being … It would be perfect for Obama to live with a group of monkeys in the world’s largest African natural zoo and lick the bread crumbs thrown by spectators.”
How does the West deal with a mentality like that, originating from a country armed with nuclear weapons? Pyongyang owns no television show that we can boycott, no sports team that we can root against.
What do we do in the face of 19th-century evil that is unapologetic, has lethal weapons at its disposal, and uses savage rhetoric to goad us? Tweet it to death?
What about the sultan of Brunei, who just enacted sharia law that orders stoning for women found “guilty” of adultery or for homosexuals engaged in sex acts? That is a different sort of war on women than that invoked by Sandra Fluke, who lamented that she did not have free birth control from the government.
Dave Rappoccio went to his first arena football game. It didn’t make him decide to give up the NFL:
Click for full comic
Last Sunday thanks to a generous fellow I obtained a free ticket to go see an AFL game. The Portland Thunder vs the Arizona Rattlers at the Moda center in PDX. It was my first ever Arena Football game. I’d never watched it (outside the occasional highlight) so I didn’t know what to expect at all. What I got was what I would describe as Football lite. Actually no, it wasn’t football lite, football lite is preseason football.
Arena Football is Football Lite lime. Lite beer is already bland, watered down and generally disappointing but no one is drinking it for the taste. You know it’s going to taste like crap. You drink it for the slight buzz to feel slightly better about yourself. Now we have Football lite lime. It’s the same crap, you know it’s going to taste like crap, but you think to yourself…well, maybe it’ll provide a slightly different type of experience. That lime might turn crappy piss football into somewhat tasty crappy piss football. So you try it. And it tastes basically exactly the same. That’s Arena Football.
[…]
Despite the weird goalposts, the 7 on 7, and everything else, it really just does feel like generic minor league football. It’s not a high enough level of play to enthrall you like the NFL, but it’s not quite wacky enough like Canadian Football to differentiate itself either. It more or less just felt like watching an NFL team do a full contact practice. I would have personally preferred more wackiness. I saw an interception off the bouncy screens, followed by a botched snap on a kick, and I got excited. This was going to be great. Then it settled into basic football and I spent most of the game mocking it along with the people I was with. The players are competent enough to get things done, but not quite exceptional to really impress you. It’s just alright. It was a good way to fill 3 hours, in many ways it was still football and fun to see football again, but it’s not going to leave a lasting impact. I was more emotionally invested in trying to get a T-shirt launched towards me from the cheerleaders than watching the game.
The story of liqueurs continues with a few more of the herbal type. In this context the word herb needs to be interpreted pretty broadly. Wherever drink is made, enterprising chaps will take some of the local spirit — distilled from grain, grapes, other fruit, rice or whatever it may be — and flavour it with almost anything they find growing near by. Many of these concoctions never travel from their home village, and no wonder. In the Dordogne area they produce a beverage called Salers, flavoured with the root of the yellow or mountain gentian, of which they have plenty. Well, there may be nastier drinks but I don’t care to imagine them.
Other agents used in liqueurs of this general type include tea, aloes, hazelnuts, thistles, cocoa, snake root, bison grass, lavender, soya beans and nutmeg, not to speak of tangy stuff like pyrethrum and rhizomal galangae — actually the last two help to produce the pleasantly burning or “warm” taste most liqueurs have.
The distinctively clean and fresh flavour of peppermint is at the heart of one of the most popular of all liqueurs, crème de menthe, of which there are numerous brands. It comes in two versions, the white or transparent and the more familiar artificially coloured bright green. Either is best served with crushed ice and drunk through a straw. If you find it too sweet, try cutting it with an equal part of cognac. When made with the white kind this is knows as the Stinger, once called for by no loss a drinks pundit than James Bond.
Peppermint is supposed to help digestion; so is aniseed, used to flavour all manner of anise liqueurs and anisettes. Marie Brizard is the most famous of them. The firm recommded it as part of a long drink with ice and fresh lemon juice, topped up with plenty of soda water. There’s no accounting for taste is what I always say.
Fans of Italian food, and others, will know about Sambuca, which is flavoured with a herb giving an effect very similar to aniseed. There’s rather a shy-making ritual that involves floating a few coffee beans on the top of your glass and putting a match In the surface to the drink, thus singeing them slightly.
Another Italian liqueur, Galliano, has gained a good deal of ground over the last few years, not as a drink on its own but as a constituent of the famous or infamous cocktail the Harvey Wallbanger, named after some reeling idiot in California. It’s basically a Screwdriver with trimmings, in other words you stir three or four parts fresh orange juice with one part vodka and some ice, then drop a teaspoonful or so of the liqueur on top.
My own favourite in this group is kümmel, flavoured with caraway seed, smooth, and best drunk slightly chilled and straight — as a liqueur, in fact.
Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.
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