Canadian whisky is often thought and spoken of as a rye whisky, and indeed rye is used in its manufacture, though corn (maize) normally preponderates. All Canadian whiskies are made with the patent still and blended with a proportion of neutral grain spirit, so that the final result is lighter than any other type, that’s to say with less body and less fullness of flavour, half a step towards vodka. It seems to be benefiting from the recent trend towards light drinks. I can’t help thinking that the Canadians are a great crowd, but are perhaps the only people who could have produced a boring whisky.
Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.
July 21, 2012
QotD: Canadian Whisky
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July 20, 2012
July 18, 2012
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July 16, 2012
We’ll grant this petition, but only one condition…
A French petition calls for the return of the British Crown Jewels to Angers, in compensation for the execution of the last Plantagenet pretender to the throne in 1499:
Angers, in the Loire valley, was the capital of Anjou province and the geographical base of the Plantagenets, who ruled England from 1154 until 1485, providing some of the most celebrated monarchs in British history, including Richard the Lionheart and Henry V.
But when Edward Plantagenet, the Earl of Warwick, was executed for treason in the Tower of London in 1499, the house’s legitimate male line came to an end. “As redress for the execution of Edward, Angers today demands that the Crown Jewels of England be transferred to Angers,” reads a petition posted on the city’s official website.
Recalling 25-year-old Edward’s “unfair and horrible death” at the hands of henchmen working for Henry VII, England’s first Tudor king, the city believes it is owed an apology and 513 years’ worth of compensation.
Tim Worstall explains the one condition under which Her Majesty should accept the French claim:
Happily stick the Crown Jewels in Angers.
Immediately after the union of the Angevin Empire with the United Kingdom.
We’ll have the Duchy of Normandy back too if you don’t mind. And Brittany (they are Bretons after all).
Francois Hollande can keep the Ile de France, the bit we didn’t have back then.
This time around let’s do European integration properly eh?
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July 14, 2012
Ontario’s latest headache in the education ministry
Mark Schatzker explains the new disaster unfolding in the Ontario government’s education file:
According to reports, a number of large unions, including CUPE, IATSE and the United Steelworkers, are already courting prominent Toronto-area student leaders. It is expected that any negotiation will include a list of long-standing student grievances. Top among them is the issue of merit based marking.
“Someone has to do something about all these losers who hog all the best marks,” said Stu, a grade 11 student at Central Etobicoke High School who did “brutal” in Functions and Applications this year.
His friend and co-organizer Luke says a union will be able to push for a “marks tax” on the top one per cent of students. “You have these total nerds who get, like 98 in Bio,” Luke explained. “We think they should give five or ten per cent of those marks to the students who get 45.”
“We have to stop rewarding greed,” Stu said.
Over at Parkside Elementary School in Scarborough, Isabelle, who is in grade seven, is also taking up the fight to make Toronto schools a closed shop. At the top of her grievance list: “geographism.”
“The way it works right now,” Isabelle explained, “is that you have to go to whatever school is closest to your house. But what if your best friend from music camp goes to a different school? How is that, like, fair?”
Sources in the Ministry of Education say the province is already close to signing a deal with elementary students with a benefits package that includes: cupcake Fridays, a ban on quinoa, and a 5.7 per cent increase in recess every year for the next four years, raising it to 20.9 minutes by 2017. (It is presently 15 minutes.)
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QotD: Monty Python fans
Monty Pythonites are a specific breed of movie quoters, ones you have to handle gently, like Renaissance Faire people and Dungeons & Dragons players (and if we’re being honest, the Venn Diagram on those three groups probably isn’t too complicated). Your film editor says this without judgment; I spent a fair amount of high school trading lines from the Parrot Sketch and “nudge nudge” with my friends, which probably (partially) explains why I didn’t spent a fair amount of high school on, y’know, dates. So my love for MPATHG is strong, but I (and all of us Python fans) must at least make the effort to resist the urge to insert “It’s just a flesh wound” and “It’s only a model” and “Ni” into every social situation. That said, if you can find an reasonable excuse to say “Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony” in an everyday conversation, well, I’m not going to judge you.
Jason Bailey, “The Movies People Need to Stop Quoting”, Flavorwire, 2012-07-12
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July 12, 2012
QotD: The real reasons for criticizing Fifty Shades of Grey
When you get down to it, the problem most people seem to have with Fifty Shades of Grey is that it’s for girls. Even worse — it’s “mommy porn”, porn for mommies, for older women to read and get excited about, and that dangerous nonsense really needs to be stopped right now. Everyone knows that the only women who are allowed to actually have sexuality are slender, high-breasted twenty-one year old virgins — rather like, it has to be said, the heroine of Fifty Shades of Grey.
Laurie Penny, “In defence of Fifty Shades of Grey”, New Statesman, 2012-07-08
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JourneyQuest S2E1: An Epic?
If you’re coming in at the middle, you can start from season 1, episode 1.
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The newest literary subgenre: the stream of unconsciousness
James Courter in the Wall Street Journal:
Is it true that college students today are unprepared and unmotivated? That generalization does injustice to the numerous bright exceptions I saw in my 25 years of teaching composition to university freshmen. But in other cases the characterization is all too accurate.
One big problem is that so few students are readers. As an unfortunate result, they have erroneous, and sometimes hilarious, notions of how the written language represents what they hear. What emerged in their papers and emails was a sort of literary subgenre that I’ve come to think of as stream of unconsciousness.
Some of their most creative thinking was devoted to fashioning excuses for tardiness, skipping class entirely, and failure to complete assignments. One guy admitted that he had trouble getting into “the proper frame of mime” for an 8 a.m. class.
Then there were the two young men who missed class for having gotten on the wrong side of the law. They both emailed me, one to say that he had been charged with a “mister meaner,” the other with a “misdeminor.”
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July 10, 2012
Does “Rule 34” have an exception after all?
Kathy Shaidle may have found the only known exception to Rule 34:
Since women (and not a few men) obviously love a man in uniform, where is all the porn featuring the Royal Canadian Mounted Police?
Dirty cops are an X-rated staple, and “the UPS guy” has almost driven the once-ubiquitous “mailman” out of the porn business.
Even Nazis get to go where Mounties fear to tread. Those sleek black (Hugo Boss-designed) SS getups can get under even the most surprising skins: During the Eichmann trial in Israel, “Stalag” porn became Über-popular sexual samizdat.
So this slightly put-out Canuck wonders: What’s wrong with the RCMP, eh? Their uniforms are pretty sharp, too. And Due South fandom was rabid.
Yet there’s a distinct Mountie-porn void, one that violates a law of the Internet — “Rule 34” to be exact, which declares, “If it exists, there is porn of it.”
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July 9, 2012
The Wonderful World of Drones
A lot of people look at these modern marvels and see automated soulless flying death-dealers that spy on all our private lives. You can trust me when I say, those people are communists.
H/T to Mike Riggs for the link.
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July 1, 2012
H.L. Mencken’s New Dictionary turns 70
Terry Teachout celebrates the 70th anniversary of the original publication of H.L. Mencken’s New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles From Ancient and Modern Sources:
The “New Dictionary” was a byproduct of its prolific editor’s fanatically industrious journalistic career. For years Mencken maintained a card file of quotations “that, for one reason or another, interested me and seemed worth remembering, but that, also for one reason or another, were not in the existing quotation-books.” In 1932 he decided to turn it into a book. When the “New Dictionary” finally saw print a decade later, Time praised it as “one of the rare books that deserve the well-worn phrase ‘Here at last.'”
Painstakingly organized and cross-referenced by subject, with each entry arranged in chronological order by date of original publication, the “New Dictionary” is formidably wide-ranging. Indeed, the only major writer missing from its index is Mencken himself. (“I thought it would be unseemly to quote myself,” he told a curious reporter. “I leave that to the intelligence of posterity.”) Its 1,347 pages abound with such innocent-sounding rubrics as “Civilization,” “Flag, American,” “Hell,” “Hypocrisy,” “Old and New” and “Science and Religion.” At first glance you might mistake it for a cornucopia of the world’s wisdom—but don’t let appearances fool you. The fathomlessly cynical Mencken wisely warned his readers in the preface that the “New Dictionary” was aimed at “readers whose general tastes and ideas approximate my own…. The Congressman hunting for platitudes to embellish his eulogy upon a fallen colleague will find relatively little to his purpose.”
He wasn’t kidding. Look up “Evolution,” for example, and you’ll find this 1925 statement by the Bible-thumping evangelist Billy Sunday: “If a minister believes and teaches evolution, he is a stinking skunk, a hypocrite, and a liar.” Look up “Critic” and you’ll be confronted with a rich catalog of ripe insults, among them this passage from Samuel Coleridge’s “Modern Critics”: “All enmity, all envy, they disclaim, / Disinterested thieves of our good name: / Cool, sober murderers of their neighbor’s fame.” Or check out “Irish,” under which can be found no less than a page of invidious comments, including a sideswipe from, of all people, Gerard Manley Hopkins: “The ambition of the Irish is to say a thing as everybody says it, only louder.”
Teachout is the author of a brilliant biography of Mencken: The Sceptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, which I happen to be re-reading at the moment. For more on Mencken himself, the wikipedia entry is here.
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June 30, 2012
Top 10 post-launch thread topics for Guild Wars 2
I found this video while doing my morning trawl for material to put into next week’s GuildMag round-up, but I liked it so much that I had to share:
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June 29, 2012
Coming soon: The Apocalypse Codex by Charles Stross
His latest novel is number 4 in the “Laundry” series, as Bob Howard recovers from his injuries accumulated over the course of The Fuller Memorandum. It should be on sale in North America next week, and a couple of weeks after that in the UK and (I assume) other European markets.
If you want to order signed copies, right now your only option is Transreal Fiction in Edinburgh, who call me in to sign books. (I will normally sign anything you shove under my nose except a cheque, but I don’t have a signing tour scheduled for The Apocalypse Codex and this is a nose-to-the-grindstone working month for me.)
If you want to know which sales channel give the author most money, the order is: ideally an undiscounted hardback from a small retailer (like Transreal), followed by a discounted hardback from a big box store or Amazon or the undiscounted UK trade paperback, then an ebook, then a discounted trade paperback from a big box store … the book will be available as a mass market paperback or discounted ebook in July 2013, which makes the author even less money, but more than a remaindered copy or a pirate download or library loan.
Want a taster of the contents? Orbit, my UK publisher, are posting extracts over the next week, starting here … or you can look below the cut!
My connection to Charles is pretty obscure: we worked for the same company (in different countries) briefly, and I met him in that context for a few minutes (this was before his writing career had taken off). His political views and mine differ pretty substantially (he thinks libertarians are, at best, deluded), but he’s a very good writer and I’ve enjoyed reading everything of his I’ve encountered.
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