Also, "John's" strategy is basically how I live off my girlfriend.
Don't you mean your hundred girlfriends?
I just assumed they were all Unfogged commenters, waiting for the next post.
"John" was awesome. But it would be better to have a strategy that yields $100, so you could make do with only 10 ladies. I can't memorize a hundred names, let alone life stories and details of previous offenses and arguments.
The hidden political issue in this article is disability insurance. As the country has been getting rid of welfare, disability insurance rolls have skyrocketed. It's the only program where you can not work and get cash.
"I hope Modern Love is around in twenty years so they can finally get one thing published."
Or they could start a blog.
Or they could start a blog.
Surely they already have.
I need to get in on that chronic fatigue syndrome honey pot. Seems easy enough to fake.
Even if it's the Washington Monthly?
Not even.
Blogs count if you have ads, purist. A few bucks revenue + self-publication = "I'm a writer."
It's all going to be forgotten anyway. And everyone goes around speaking a lot of nonsense. But you've managed it so various socially awkward people read about your lap times. It's something.
Well it's no lexicon triumvirate. But it's maybe a tenth of a lexicon triumvirate. Three more and you'll almost have a virate.
No, seriously. You could have written Absurdistan for all I know. But the unfogged thing, it's good.
Now go eat a poop sandwich, you poop.
This article does not explain the hordes on Piedmont and Lakeshore, who not only seem to be able to get by on their own malingering but always come with a dog and/or baby that they're supporting somehow as well. More research into this important topic is clearly needed.
Obviously they're tenured academics, so doing the research should be easy.
More research into this important topic is clearly needed.
Pitch it to the Chronicle.
Start dating one of them, then pitch it to Modern Love.
"I first saw him at Peet's at 10:00 on a Wednesday morning when his dog Sontag stuck her nose in my hand. We quickly fell in love, but soon I realized that I loved the dog more than him. Walking down Piedmont with Sontag and what's-his-name made me feel a little less alone in the big scary upper-middle-class world I call home. We broke up, but I now follow them down Piedmont when he's not looking because I miss that dog -- and that fleeting sense of connection in a big, unfeeling world -- so much."
Day job: GONE.
Keith Kessler's got a pretty good deal.
His dog Sontag? How could anyone fall in love with someone who named their dog Sontag?
What (besides gin, of course) goes with vermouth?
Rye or bourbon, for a Manhattan.
Ice and a lemon wedge, if you're feeling like a Hemingway character. Or vodka, if you want to pretend you're drinking a martini but have an aversion to gin.
You can rinse a glass with vermouth, pepper the rim, then add Absolut Peppar, horseradish, tomato juice, worchestershire sauce, and pepperoncini juice, shaken. It's like the cocktail version of a bloody mary, and incredibly delicious.
Vermouth plus rum plus other stuff (orange juice?) is a Presidente. I think that about does it for vermouth cocktails, although a Lillet cocktail is muy tasty.
Teo, you use sweet vermouth for a manhattan, though. Dry vermouth is what goes in a martini (and thus goes with gin).
A Presidente seems to involve grenadine as well, so I think that's out. I'm not sure if we have rum, anyway.
I don't know what kind of vermouth it is. I'll have to check.
The drink described in 31 sounds very good, but it would involve buying a bunch of stuff, which is kind of the opposite of what I'm going for here.
Half sweet and half dry vermouth = a Perfect Manhattan (my favorite).
Inventory your assets, Teo. You have one bottle of some sort of vermouth. What else? Do you have a wheelbarrow?
A couple bottles of whiskey. Not sure what else. It's my friend's stuff, actually; I don't have it with me.
Then it's dry. Here are some things you can make with dry vermouth.
Really, though, I wouldn't use the vermouth for anything but a small party where you can make the martinis properly (with a shaker). If you have a bunch of whiskey and it's cheap, then just throw it into coke or ginger ale, and everyone should be happy! And drunk.
We need to get rid of the vermouth, though.
Drink of the Week has drinks broken down by type of alcohol.
It has been a very long time since I drank vermouth straight, but as I recall it wasn't bad on a hot day.
Drink of the Week's Manhattan recipe calls for either sweet or dry vermouth.
Just employ the time-honored technique that I have used to get rid of the remains of every bottle of vermouth I've ever owned: leave it for the person who rents your apartment after you.
Play party games where the loser has to take a shot of vermouth.
Be aware that in any sort of tasty cocktail, the vermouth is going to compose at most 10% by volume, which makes it hard to get rid of.
It's not actually mine, and the person it does belong to (really, the guy who got stuck with all his friends' leftover liquor because they all left before him) lives in the dorms. Leaving alcohol behind: probably not a good idea.
51: Bother. Internet perversion of the Manhattan using dry vermouth it is, then!
(It should be noted that this stuff is, like, 5 bucks a bottle. So if it takes more than 5 dollars of additional supplies to use it, commence with pouring down the sink.)
OT: Here's a headline to get Orwell spinning in his grave. Although I suppose the way things are going they probably have to put a tachometer on his headstone.
51: Actually, if anyone's likely to appreciate the "gift" of bad alcohol, it's a broke-ass student.
54: True, but if anyone's unlikely to appreciate that gift it's a university administration.
"administration" s/b "custodian", which makes the truth of the claim dubious
God, for the halcyon days of my youth, when we could get in trouble only for drinking alcohol, not for owning it.
My freshman year roommate went with a straight face to the administration and demanded that his cognac, confiscated by a public safety officer, be returned. They complied.
He's 21, so I doubt he'd get in any really serious trouble, but I'm pretty sure there are regulations against having alcohol in the dorms no matter how old you are.
It's sad how the inevitable slide into dhimmitude has ruined college for people teo's age. In my day, the school paid for alcohol.
The school is happy to sell it to us one day a year. Otherwise, they don't really want to see it.
Teo, seriously, if the custodian sees a problem with abandoned alcohol bottles, odds are he'll take them home.
And yes, university custodians usually are men.
In my day we'd have finished off all three bottles by now. Sometimes this electronic shit isn't really progress.
His dog Sontag? How could anyone fall in love with someone who named their dog Sontag?
It's a Modern Love pitch, remember.
63: Okay, it's been a while since I lived in the dorms, but my recollection is that before they get cleaned out the RA or whoever inspects them to see if there's any damage etc. to the room, and if they find any contraband there's some sort of penalty. I'm not 100% sure about this, though.
In Spain, I was offered straight vermouth as a cocktail. I do not recommend drinking vermouth in this manner. But still, man up! Martini night! Woot!
Okay, again, no gin or vodka is available, and we're definitely not buying anything, since the purpose of this activity is to get rid of stuff. I saw my friend tonight and he confirmed that the vermouth is dry and the only other non-beer alcohol he has is whiskey.
Mix those with some lime juice.
I should probably read threads before commenting.
You must have read at least part of the thread, since vermouth isn't mentioned in the post. Unless that was just some astounding coincidence.
You could, young teo, hold the vermouth in your mouth and imagine the other proposed flavors comingling around its bitter, nasty nastiness; then, you could blog about it, a sort of thought-experiment kind of thing.
There's like half a bottle, though. I don't know if I could keep that up for long enough.
Just start drinking and writing. We'll be the judge. I'll give you a topic: fricative consonants in the Navajo language and their relation to ska bands from '96 that made ogged feel good about his oolong.
Fuck, there seems to be no html character for slash-l. If there were, though, I could have made an awesome comment responding to 74.
Decent vermouth can be drunk straight, actually.
You should pick up some kirschwasser and make what Dave Wondrich claims is one of the great forgotton cocktails, the Rose: 2oz dry vermouth, 1oz kirsch, 1tsp raspberry syrup.
Noted with interest, but I still hate you, as per the canon.
You can perform an interesting (IMO, but then, I thought of it, so I would have that opinion) variation on the rose by substituting sweet for dry vermouth, plum brandy (yellow or blue, it makes no mind to my palate) for the kirsch, and peach bitters for the raspberry syrup.
Yes, Teo, it's native to Forgot Town.
Let me clarify that I don't mean 1tsp of peach bitters, but rather a dash or two.
77 and 79 both sound kind of gross, actually. Kirsch isn't syrupy enough already?
This sort of thing. The claim that the raspberry eau de vie is a proper brandy, and not a distilled macerate, is extremely interesting; every other such product I've seen has been of the latter sort (the sort of thing they're doing with the douglas fir thing, which I bet is also extremely interested and you're all welcome to buy me a bottle).
They're really letting just anyone in here nowadays.
85: Ah, the petulance of the girl drink drunk
Peach bitters? Never heard of them, and I'm intrigued. Have Peychaud's and Angostura on hand (as well as a bottle of kirsch!), but I imagine peach bitters would impart a significantly different flavor.
53: Argh. You know, when I saw that story about McCain calling someone a chickenshit, I was tempted to complain about the media, but I noticed that it was in the Washington Post's blog rather than their news section, so I ignored it. This, though, looked like it was in the news section, which is awful. "Breaking news! Special report! Candidate has really, really biting comeback!" Horserace coverage + slow news day = teh awful.
88: They've fixed the headline a bit since I posted 53. The original was something like "McCain Fires Back at Romney With Three-Pronged Swipe," which was why the Orwell reference.
84: Clear Creek is an excellent distillery. I tasted the first batch of the Doug fir thing, which was frighteningly neon green and very bizarre-tasting, but apparently he's been working on re-creating the Alsatian tree spirit for ten years since, so I gather it's improved. If the Unfoggetariat wishes to take up a collection, I'll pick you up a bottle the next time I go by the distillery, but I can't guarantee that it will be full when it reaches you.
Peach bitters is made by Fee's, who also make a really good old-fashioned bitters (vaguely Angostura-like but spicier), and are misnamed to a certain extent: they're not really bitter at all; in fact, they're a little sweet. A few drops in some rye is pretty nice.
Hermes in Japan and some guys in Germany calling themselves The Bitter Truth are also apparently manufacturing some interesting bitters, including a recreation of Abbott's bitters, and some things that sound frankly bizarre to me (lemon bitters?!), but I've never had any of 'em.
I wonder how the fir stuff relates to this zirbenz stone stuff. Also: gentian schnapps? People do strange things with booze.
Also good: orange bitters. I have the Fee's but want to get a bottle of the Regan's, as well. It comes in a ten ounce bottle, though, which is sort of nuts.
I've got 'em both, having bought the Regan's from a bartender at Pegu in nyc. People who spend a lot more time drinking than I do seem to think that each is good for different sorts of drinks, and that the Hermes orange bitters is a happy middle between the two. Also, Angostura's coming out with an orange bitters RSN that is apparently the shit.
Somehwæt back on topic, the fix that Shauna, trust-fund baby contemplating a career in psychology out of boredom, is in is utterly incomprehensible to me. I can understand, of course, that having nothing to do would lead to boredom, just not that someone would have nothing to do simply because of having no job. If I were a man of means I'm pretty sure I could find no end of ways of filling my days—one could learn languages, take classes (ok, I already take classes, but I'm thinking of crafty classes and not just academical classes), travel, learn to play an instrument, go on hikes, tinker with computers, &c&c&c, & these are just things I would find interesting. How is it possible that someone can live for 24 years and be reduced to finding a job out of boredom? There's no indication in the article that she finds psychology especially interesting—has she no interests at all?
The Bitter Truth. One can at the very least assert that their labels are attractive.
This is pretty common phenomenon, I think. I don't think the problem is lack of interests (though it might be), but lack of structure. When you can travel or take a class or go sailing whenever you feel like it, you might do those things fairly often, and yet be left with a lot of unfilled time and no way to structure it, which can be boring. You can also feel purposeless, which also feels a lot like boredom.
Lemon bitters might be nice in an Aviation.
91: Sounds as though it's a pretty similar flavor, even though it's made from fresh pine cones rather than buds. The sweetness probably helps to mitigate the resiny atringency.
Things I did not know, from Wikipedia's article on bitters: gentian is the primary flavor in Angostura bitters, and Angostura bitters is the most widely distributed bar item in the world.
She just needs to make a decisive commitment.
This reminds me of a Fun Moment in Counterintuitive Etymological Argumentation I recently encountered in an article by Frankfurt, attributed to Hobbes: it's called "deliberation" because the result is to remove liberty.
100!
Angostura bitters doesn't contain angostura bark, but Fee's aromatic bitters does. I think Angostura bitters contains rue, though.
It's harder to make a decisive commitment when you don't have to. And when everyone around you is structuring their lives around what they have to do to meet their economic needs, having to invent a structure of your own could be kind of lonely.
Thus proving that only strong, free spirits should have trust funds.
Some rich families do a good job with instilling a belief in public service or charitable works, but the kids of the ones that don't can be pretty miserable. We should have a national holiday in honor of rudderless trust fund babies.
Why not just solve their problem by confiscating the trust funds and giving them to the needy. Everyone's happier.
Close. Trust funds should be given only to people who didn't grow up expecting them, and only after they've been around long enough to figure out what they're all about without the trust fund baby stuff getting in the way.
I'm hoping for some random rich dude to drop dead and leave me a bundle any day now.
I think you're right. Then we'll get out of Iraq.
Of all the things to criticize trust fund babies for doing, looking for a career doesn't seem to be that high on my list.
But looking for a career in mental health because you're bored ought to move it up a few notches.
I learned something new about kirsch today.