What’s Important In Life
Joining what I hope will be a chorus of obituaries today:
What’s important in life? Good Scotch, friends, laughter, and speaking your mind forcefully and gracefully.
Burt Likko
Pseudonymous Portlander. Pursuer of happiness. Bon vivant. Homebrewer. Atheist. Recovering Republican. Recovering Catholic. Recovering divorcé. Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of Ordinary Times. Relapsed Lawyer, admitted to practice law (under his real name) in California and Oregon. There's a Twitter account at @burtlikko, but not used for posting on the general feed anymore. House Likko's Words: Scite Verum. Colite Iusticia. Vivere Con Gaudium.
Johnny Walker Black does indeedy make a good workaday default scotch. And I say this as someone who prefers single malts to blends.
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Have you ever had Blue Label?Report
Red, Black, Green and Gold. No Blue.
There’s a huge difference between the Red and the Black. There’s a good difference between the Black and the Green (not quite enough to justify the price difference, IMO, but I’d probably think differently if I was single and had this income). There’s a good difference between the Green and the Gold, but I don’t get either of them often enough to call this one authoritatively.
Is the Blue “Ever So Much Moreso” than the Green/Gold?Report
It’s a bit like wine. I was given a bottle of Blue that I believe cost $300. For a joke I blind tested someone (an avowed scotchophile) showing him I was pouring the Blue Label but switched his glass with something called Potter’s, which I’ve heard is one of the worst scotches, but then again my dad always said, “There’s no such thing as a bad scotch”. Naturally he raved about the Potter’s and explained how the excellent character, the perfect blending… yadda yadda yadda. I wanted to let him in on the trick but didn’t have the heart.
For myself there are about a half dozen scotches I prefer to the Blue. But I love the silk lined casket the Blue comes in, nice touch (riffing on the old psychology meme that drinkers are just cowardly suicides).Report
Burt, will dearly miss Hitch and his take no prisoners style of writing. He was not capable of ever writing a dull word and to his great credit, his support of removing the Saddam regime was unwavering and quite courageous. One of my very favorite pieces of his was when he just eviscerated Joe Wilson, King of all fops, a man so deceitful and stupid he didn’t even realize his own words proved that Iraq DID indeed seek to purchase yellow cake uranium. To think the State Dept. would send this stooge to do any kind of an investigation, just boggles the mind. Oddly, people had a very difficult time understanding that to”seek” something does not mean you succeeded in your quest.
And Bush’s so-called 16 words controversy, turned out to be 100% true. There was absolutely no connection between the forgeries and what British Intelligence uncovered. Here’s the article.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2006/08/plame_out.htmlReport
I find that I can’t think of anything to say, so I’ll share with you this song by George Hrab, inspired by one of Hitchens’s books: God is not Great.Report
In his memory today I’m going to read a book while drinking liquor. Also because I’m awake.Report
Per slacktivist (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2011/12/16/christopher-hitchens-1949-2011/), Hitchens wouldn’t want to “Rest In Peace”. He was much too much of a contrarian for that!Report