Category: whisky

2023 Wind-down, 16: Comfort Watches

Fireplace, with whisky and my Comfort Non-Watch.

Over at his site, John Scalzi is spending December doing his own sort of Wind-down, though he isn’t calling it such. Specifically, he’s writing about a movie each day — a “comfort watch” that he goes back to time and again.

I like the idea. I could maybe pass a month that way myself.

Today, though, I’m instead going to tell you about a Comfort Non-Watch.

So, I’m a big fan of Bruce Campbell, have been ever since a friend of mine in middle school invited me over to his house, which was near a video store, which we went to, where his friend at the register totally ignored the fact that we were well under 18 and rented us Evil Dead.

If you don’t know Evil Dead, I’ll just go ahead and tell you it’s the best low-(almost no)-budget made-in-a-random-cabin-in-Tennessee-by-two-lifelong-friends-then-in-their-twenties-with-a-camera-and-a-dream horror film ever.

The next weekend, my friend and I watched Evil Dead 2, but, like the movie itself, that’s another story.

Anyway, since that fateful underage viewing of Evil Dead, I’ve made an effort to watch most everything Bruce Campbell has been in. It’s the rare case where I follow an actor rather than a writer or director. He’s just damned good, certainly the best B-movie actor of his generation.

There are a few things I’ve missed along the way, though.

I’ve seen most of his films, and most of the TV series he’s been in1, but the gaps, naturally, bug me.

One of those gaps is Running Time, a low-budget, black-and-white heist film from 1997 with a running time of 70 minutes.

I mention the running time because the entire film, in keeping with its title, is presented in real-time and as one continuous take.

Now, I’d heard of this, of course, and it was on my “get to it eventually” list — where it had so much company it would never want for conversation — but I hadn’t gone to the trouble of tracking down a copy of the DVD, which is rare and also the only way to watch the film. (I scoured every streaming service. Nobody has it.)

Then I found out that the role Campbell plays — Carl, the just-released-from-prison thief who gets pulled in for a job — is one of his top five2 favorite roles from his entire career.3

Well, then.

Off to eBay I went, and after some searching and waiting I scored a still-in-the-shrink-wrap copy for less than the cost of a good bottle of whisky.

And it’s been sitting on the shelf since, waiting for its moment, my Comfort Non-Watch, that movie which I am excited to see but hold in reserve for a day when I really need it.

Here’s what I’m drinking today: J.P. Wiser’s 18-Year-Old Canadian Whisky.

What a minute!

Yes, that’s what I was drinking yesterday.

But why?

Well, a few reasons, starting with the fact that I didn’t really feel like cracking into something else this evening and ending with the fact that if I don’t get ahead of The Empress of Whisky I might not get another pour off this bottle.

Will you have something new tomorrow?

Probably not. I’ve got some family holiday shenanigans to get through, which, while they may very well involve whisky, might not leave me with time to write about it.

I’ve decided not to push myself the way I used to when it comes to writing these. I’d like to have one each day, now that I’ve started, but I’m not going to eat that pressure this year.

If I do have whisky this weekend, I’ll take pictures and catch you up later.

Check out yesterday’s post for a story about my dating anniversary, as well as my tasting notes on J.P. Wiser’s 18-Year-Old Canadian Whisky. Or skip ahead to a tale of rum.

  1. I’ve been making my way through Burn Notice off and on this year — it’s not bad, if formulaic; Campbell is excellent as Sam Axe — and I’ll eventually force myself to watch the episodes of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess in which he guest-starred as Autolycus, King of Thieves. ↩︎
  2. Carl Matushka in Running Time; Brisco County, Jr. in The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.; Sam Axe in Burn Notice; Ash Williams in the Evil Dead films and the TV show Ash vs Evil Dead; and Elvis in Bubba Ho-Tep, a criminally underrated film featuring an aged Elvis and a black man who claims to be John F. Kennedy facing off against an ancient — is there any other kind? — Egyptian mummy in an east Texas nursing home. ↩︎
  3. I know this because I heard the words from Bruce Campbell’s own mouth when I saw him at Bruce-O-Rama at The Caverns this summer. He did Q&A, ran a quiz show, and introduced a screening of Evil Dead 2. It was awesome. ↩︎

2023 Wind-down, 17: 18 for 18

J.P. Wiser’s 18-Year-Old Blended Canadian Whiskey

That title is not a randomly generated number string.

Bear with me.

17: That’s how many days are left in the year.

The first 18: This refers to the whisky at hand, J.P. Wiser’s 18-Year-Old Blended Canadian Whisky.

The second 18: This refers to the fact that 18 years ago, this gal and I started dating. These days I call her The Empress of Whisky.

Now.

When I used to do this regularly, I’d tell you a bit about the dram, then a bit about why I chose it and whatnot.

So.

To be bloody blunt about it, J.P. Wiser’s 18-Year-Old Blended Canadian Whisky was the most affordable 18-year-old whisky at the bottle shoppe where The Empress and I found ourselves a couple of evenings ago.

18 years is a significant point in whisky, especially Scotch whisky. Not every distillery has an 18-year-old offering, but if they have an offering beyond the common 10, 12, and 15, it’s likely an 18. I’ve had some quite fine ones over the years.

But.

We’re usually talking three figures.

Which, well, I don’t know your economic standing or spending philosophy, but that’s the point where mine says OUCH.

I don’t doubt the quality, necessarily, but I do begin to doubt — What’s that economic term? Oh, “marginal value.” — the marginal value of the drinking experience beyond the three-digit price threshold. 

I’m also reminded of a favorite line from a favorite book, which is:

I passed him the bottle and watched as he decanted two careful fingers. Jimmy de Soto had always said it was sacrilege to sink more than five fingers of single malt on any one occasion. After that, he maintained, you might as well be drinking blended.

— Takeshi Kovacs,
narrator of Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

See, at a certain point, you have to ask yourself why you’re drinking: Is it for the fleeting sensations of taste experienced in the moment, or is it for the butterflies and rainbows in your head afterwards?

It’s okay to say both.

Thing is, if you’re spending into the triple digits per bottle, I think you’d better:

a) Really damn appreciate the dram.

AND

b) Just appreciate the dram, singular, not plural.

So.

This is the point where I bring it all together.

We bought this bottle of 18-year-old J.P. Wiser’s Blended Canadian Whiskey for less than a three-digit price.

Which is fine and understandable because:

a) Canadian whisky isn’t Scotch whisky, in terms of price or quality.

AND

b) Blended whisky — even the aged stuff — isn’t single malt, in terms of price or quality.

Nonetheless, for the act of getting out of the bottle shoppe without dropping a hundo, there was much rejoicing.

But there would have been regardless because, as noted above, The Empress and I have been together for 18 years now.

Which, to those who scoff at dating anniversaries, I say: Avert your eyes. Or learn to have fun. Preferably the second.

Yes, we have a wedding anniversary, and, yes, we observe it. But there’s something simple and pure about marking the point each year when we can add up our total years in one and another’s company, appreciate the fact that we continue to appreciate each other, and have a dram.

And the fact that we’re just fine with a sub-$100 dram for the occasion is just one note of the success and maturity of our 18-year-old relationship.

Or, as The Empress herself put it when we filled our glasses tonight: “We’re not just wiser — we’re J.P. Wiser.”

You can see why I love her.

The dram: J.P. Wiser’s Irish Whiskey, aged 18 years.

The drink: Warm and full and malty-sweet in a way that Canadian whisky often isn’t while still incredibly smooth in the way that Canadian whisky always is.

The dream: This is only the first 18 years.

The toast: To love, of course!

New here? Or just not sure what the hell is going on? Check out yesterday’s post for a few answers. And look! Here’s tomorrow’s post! It’s editing magic!

How My Brain Works: About An Hour in the Life of Jon

It’s about 11 a.m. on a Wednesday morning.

I am at my desk at home, ostensibly looking for work.

For me, this entails a mix of job search, review, and application. I get quickly bored and overwhelmed by this task, so between steps, I pop over to Facebook, where I have been passing messages with friends lately, doing my best to make up for being oh so bad at correspondence for, broadly speaking, a year or more, and, more generally, a lifetime.

In the course of one of these conversations I offer an old friend, who is planning a visit to the ATL, the opportunity to stay at my home rather than book a room. I quietly applaud myself for remembering to ask if stairs might be an issue, given that the guest room is upstairs.

Thus begins the following sequence:

The stair handrail is a bit loose where it is anchored to the wall at the second floor landing.

I should fix that, especially since I have told The Empress of Whisky that I’m up for doing this sort of thing, what with all the free time on my hands just now.

Get up from computer. Start walking downstairs, to utility closet where tools are stored.

Upon opening utility closet, where cat’s litter box is located, remember I haven’t scooped it today.

Realize I need to pee.

Go to bathroom. Pee. Skip hand-washing, due to next planned activity.

[Somewhere along here, this blog post begins forming in my mind.]

Scoop litter box.

Dispose of results.

Wash hands.

Return to utility closet. Acquire a wall anchor and the right screwdriver to use with it.

[The blog post is definitely coming together now, looking good in my head. I decide to write first, then attack the handrail fix.]

Reach computer. Phone beeps. Check messages.

As I am checking messages, I hear Cat meowing from hallway, outside bedroom. She does this, frequently, when I am home and The Empress of Whisky is not. I think, sometimes, that she thinks I have The Empress locked away in the bedroom. I think this because sometimes Cat will not stop meowing until I have gone to door, opened it, and shown her that The Empress is not, in fact, languishing in the bedroom. She has not mysteriously teleported there from her office downtown. All is well, Cat. Cat then usually rubs on some shoes belonging to The Empress and, thus appeased, leaves the bedroom.

Sometimes, though, and this is one of those times, Cat will instead come when I call and enter the office to sit upon my lap.

This makes work difficult because it is harder to reach things like the keyboard. Left-handed mouse work is okay, though, as is using my phone.

Wait, the phone beeped awhile ago!

Pick up phone, respond to texts while Cat is purring contentedly on my lap.

Just as I have done about all I can before getting back to the keyboard, Cat hops up of her own volition and goes off to either find a sleeping spot or re-investigate the closet I am, as of this morning (before the time-frame of the events described herein), sorting and rearranging. Possibly both.

Begin writing in earnest. Get as far as these words right here.

Realize phone has been beeping a bit while I have been in the flurry of writing this entire post.

Pause to appreciate, again, how wonderful it feels right now that the words are flowing and the rate of brain composition and my typing speed are matching up damn near perfectly, which has been a rare thing in the past but is really happening a lot more often lately and goddamn I feel fantastic about that.

My eyes are watering a bit, probably allergy-related. (This is not a euphemism for crying. I really do have irritating year-round allergies that mostly mean a runnier-than-average nose but occasionally mean watery eyes. This is all while medicated. Ugh.)

Appreciate, again, having switched to a higher grade of tissue (Kleenex Ultra Soft, rather than regular Kleenex). This was initially done, at my — later proved correct — thought that they would be kinder on the nose of The Empress of Whisky, who had been down with a cold until just recently. (Yes, she applied bourbon. We know our medicine.)

Answer more texts.

Also? I love my clackity-clack old school keyboard, with its nifty backlit keys.

Take note of just how many words — ATL, teleported, clackity, backlit / and later, vis — I have added to my personal dictionary in the course of writing this post. (I really loathe red underlines that aren’t actual typos. And. Yet. I. Keep. Adding. Words. To. My. Personal. Dictionary. Forever. And. Ever. Amen.)

Pause.

Review post so far. Adjust a few words. (But not many! Damn, they really are behaving  well for me lately.)

Note the time: 11:56.

Get up.

It takes about five minutes to realize this handrail fix isn’t going to work. Specifically, I realize this after inserting the base of the wall anchor, beginning to apply the screw that will attach the rail to it and bind the two tightly to the wall, when the whole anchor goes THWERTHUMP! and slips into the space behind the drywall.

(I did not add THWERTHUMP to my personal dictionary. The red line under it bugs me a lot, but that ain’t a word, so what to do? Leave it. Ignore it. You can do this, Jon.)

Realize someone probably tried this — or something like it — before, which is why the whole damn thing is loose in the first place.

Wash hands. (I have … a thing … about keeping my hands clean.)

Return to desk.

Sigh.

Write most of the rest of this post.

Facebook is dinging to let me know I have new messages, and my phone is beeping again. Ignore both because I am on deadline.

Recall how, just two days ago, My Friend The Former Lifestyle Editor Who Retired And Turned Mystery Writer told me something like, “I find deadlines very helpful.”

Remember how I used to always, for purposes of anonymity, refer to my friends in the manner such as My Friend The Former Lifestyle Editor Who Retired And Turned Mystery Writer and wonder whether I need to keep doing that.

Realize I am, in fact, running over deadline — think here, as always, of Douglas Adams and his statement: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” — and that I may be in danger of overselling this whole piece.

Pause for editing. Quickly, now!

Reach for mouse to push the cursor toward that big red button in the top corner of my screen marked “Publish…”.

Worry whether anyone will realize I did not, in fact, fuck up grammatically — vis-a-vis quotation marks, accurately writing what that button says within them, and proper sentence-ending punctuation — in that last sentence.

Shrug.

Reach for mouse …

 

2017 Whisky Wind-down: Primer

If you follow my writing here on even a semi-regular basis, you’ll have noticed, well, “semi-regular basis” is about as good as it gets. There are, shall we say, “gaps” in my publishing schedule, assuming I have a publishing schedule, which, of course, I do not.

And yet, last December, I posted daily for an entire month.

I owe that rare publication streak to whisky and friends. In the course of friendly conversation, I and several “booze enthusiasts” of my acquaintance noted the growing prevalence of alcohol-based advent calendars. Not only were they suddenly everywhere, there were seemingly collections curated for every palate and budget. It occurred to me that it would be fun to use one of these as a daily jumping-off point for writing.

Advent was starting by the time I had that realization. However, while I am overall pretty bad at planning ahead (and shopping), I am aces at keeping whisky on-hand.

I daily profiled (to the limit of my amateur-but-improving abilities) one whisky from my collection, with accompanying anecdotes and other ramblings each somehow thematically related to the selected dram.

It wasn’t advent, exactly.

That term has a particular meaning in liturgy relating to Christmas; since what I really wanted was to say goodbye to a shit year, the exercise instead became a countdown to the end.

I’m not going to rehash my loathing for 2016. I’m not even going to (yet) get into my feelings about 2017.

What I am going to do is get my ass back to the keyboard. I’ve been away longer than I meant to be. Now the whisky is calling me back.

With that, lastgreypoet.com proudly presents “2016 Whisky Wind-down 2: 2017 Whisky Wind-down, The Quickening Boogaloo for More Money.”

Or “2017 Whisky Wind-down,” if you’re into brevity.

Later today, maybe, I’ll get started.

Writing, I mean. The whisky is already open.

Obviously.

—–

Note: If you missed last year’s adventure, you can catch up by hitting the 2016 Whisky Wind-down category tag. If that seems like too much reading, you can get the basics in last year’s primer or just skip to the end. If you are unfamiliar with whisky (or need a refresher) there is also this post on terminology.

 

Resolved

I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions.

Which is a good thing.
If I did, one of them would probably be something along the lines of “blog more diligently,” and, as you can see, I kinda suck at that.
And I’m sure “stop procrastinating” would make the list annually.
Said list would be two weeks late, just like this blog post.

While I may not make New Year’s Resolutions, I do sometimes make decisions that might be considered resolutions, and I do so as the whim strikes me.

In the spirit of the New(ish) Year 2012, I’m going to look back on three of those from 2011.
SODAS

I had a couple of sodas over the holidays, and they were the first ones I’d consumed in months. If ditching soda had been a resolution, I’d have totally nailed it. It wasn’t. I just made a decision, back in May, that the stuff wasn’t good for me, and I haven’t changed my mind.

Yay, me.
BOOZE

On a related note, as I observed a short while after I made my choice to ditch fizzy sugar water — more accurately, in my case, “fizzy possibly-carcinogenic-sweetener water” — this decision meant leaving behind a once-beloved drink (rum+Coke) and put me in search of a new go-to cocktail.

I’m happy to report that I have settled on the Warren Ellis Cocktail. (Google it.)
Yay, me.
MONEY
I also made a minor financial decision early last year that I never wrote about.
A few years back, when I started my current job, I was invited to join The Lottery Club. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, it involves pitching in a couple bucks a week toward the purchase of big-game lottery drawings, with the (explicit) goal of pooling resources to “improve your chances” of striking it rich and the (implicit) goal of insuring that you won’t be the one poor bastard left to work for a living should your coworkers strike it rich.
I’ve always known lottery odds are terrible — if you need an example, look no further than Rob Cockerham’s Incredibly Depressing Mega Millions Lottery Simulator — but I finally decided to stop throwing away money in adherence to “everyone in the office might get rich EXCEPT ME!” fear and do something more productive.

So I opened a new IRA for the sole purpose of depositing the $2 I’d been spending in the lottery club each week.

I rounded it off to $10 a month, to make automatic deposits easier, and I started in April.
Results? After nine months, I’m pleased to report that my $90 is now $90.67.

At this rate, I may be able to move up my retirement plans by an hour or so.

On the other hand, my coworkers who are still in the lottery club “invested” the same $90 and do not have even $0.67 to show for it.

Yay, me.

So, that’s three good things I accomplished last year, none of which I pledged to do in January.
As 2012 begins, I have no resolutions.
But I may very well let you know of any that cross my mind as the year goes on.