Jacob Grier

Former Vanderbilt Chancellor is one of two Ohio university presidents to sign on to the Amethyst Initiative, a movement among administrators to lower the drinking age from its current ridiculous high of 21. Gee’s actually predictably soft on the issue, but it’s good to his name on there just the same.

The complete list if signatories is here. New Vandy Chancellor Zeppos doesn’t appear. Get on it, Nick!

[Via Agitator co-blogger Ryan Grim.]

December 5 of this year will mark the 75th anniversary of the 21st Amendment’s ratification and the end of national Prohibition. To celebrate, Old Forester is crafting a limited edition Repeal Bourbon for release this winter:

“Repeal Bourbon is bottled from a special selection of Old Forester barrels that exhibited a more robust character that is similar to the Old Forester that was bottled during Prohibition,” added Chris Morris, Master Distiller for Old Forester. “The flavor, presented at Prohibition’s required 100 proof, is a full, deep, charred oak character that will appeal to bourbon-lovers everywhere.”

Bureaucrash celebrated last year with a party in Arlington, across the river from DC in protest of the city’s smoking ban. Inside the city things got a little rough…

[Via Jeff Morgenthaler.]

I wasn’t completely honest when I said that I had to leave my entire home bar behind in Virginia. I actually did tuck one bottle of liquor into my car, a sample of Sobieski Vodka that arrived just as I was packing up to leave. Now that I’m relaxing in Michigan I’ve finally had a chance to crack it open.

“Spicy aromas of star anise, cream, minerals and powdered sugar follow through to a round, silky entry and a smooth off-dry medium-to-full body with a long, lingering whipped cream, spice, rye dough, and sweet citrus fade with virtually no heat,” writes the Beverage Tasting Institute. Um, ok. I’m not getting all that. But I am getting a very smooth, very drinkable vodka that’s good both neat and on the rocks. It’s distilled in Poland from Mazowse rye, and that lends a pleasant but not overpowering spice to the glass.

I’d heard a few comments that this vodka was very good for the price, but I still had a bit of sticker shock when I opened up the included materials and saw what it sells for. Not because it’s high, but because it’s surprisingly low: just $11.99 for a 750 ml bottle. Sobieski’s running a clever sort of anti-marketing marketing campaign, mocking the over-priced brands that emphasize everything except quality. They’ve come through with a vodka that tastes good without breaking the bank. Given the price, I could definitely see using this a lot in my next home bar.

OK, this isn’t really why I love Michigan, but how could I not stop at this place? They make all their own jerky, available in barrels throughout the store. Walk around and the owners are will snip off samples while you browse. They do beef, pork, turkey, and wild game like alligator, elk, and antelope (which was pretty good). Shelves of hot sauces line the wall. If you’re passing through Dundee, MI, it’s right off the highway. They also sell online.

I’ve been invited to guest write for a couple of weeks on Radley Balko’s excellent site, The Agitator, while he’s on vacation in Alaska. Radley’s a good friend and writes one of the best blogs around, so of course I accepted. I’ll post here too, but most of my updates will probably be over there. My intro post is here and I posted an entry about tobacco control just a few minutes ago. And if you don’t like me, head over anyway for the rest of the talented guest blogging crew.

It’s still far from the level of the infamous GMail application, but I’m amused that my year-old post on camel crickets has become a support forum for the women they terrorize.

Persuaded by this Slate article calling it the “Lazy Man’s Guide to Web 2.0,” I’ve imported my blog, Twitter, and Flickr RSS feeds into FriendFinder. So if you’d rather get them all in one place, here you go.

One of the casualties of my move west was my fairly extensive home bar. There’s only so much that can fit into my car and all those bottles, alas, didn’t make the cut. They’re all either given to friends who helped me move or put into storage. So if you can find my storage locker in Virginia and break the lock, you can have a hell of a party on me.

Because of this I was a little worried about the upcoming Mixology Monday. I have almost nothing on me and the only nearby liquor store in my present location of Upper Peninsula Michigan doesn’t offer much besides bad gin, Canadian whiskey, and a tiny selection of other basic spirits. Luckily, this month’s MxMo happens to be perfectly tailored to my situation. Kevin at Save the Drinkers chose the theme of “local flavor” to guide our mixing:

Option 1: Gather ingredients that are representative of the culture/geography/tackiness of your respective cities and make a drink with a truly place-based style. For example, huckleberries are native to the geographical area where I live, as are elderflowers, potatoes, and extremely conservative, closet-case politicians. (I’m just saying!)

Option 2: Dig up an old drink that came from your city and revive it! If you can find the original bar, that would be even more interesting.

I don’t know of any cocktails created in Cederville or Hessel, so option 1 it is. The first step was to find the starting spirit, and this is one case in which the local liquor store came through for me: True North vodka from the new Grand Traverse Distillery. It’s not quite Upper Peninsula, but Traverse City is close enough, and with each batch pot distilled from locally-grown rye I couldn’t say no. While I’m not a vodka enthusiast, this one retains enough of its character that I’d happily drink it straight on the rocks. A good find.

This being cherry country, True North also makes a vodka flavored with “cherry essence and a hint of chocolate,” so I picked up a bottle of that too. It tastes a bit too medicinal for me on its own, but the flavors are well-balanced.

So now we’re up to two Northern Michigan ingredients, but I wanted to make this even more local. The next step was to wander around our cottage plucking leaves off of trees, taking in their aromas, and figuring out what would go best in a cocktail. Spruce narrowly beat out balsam for the strongest and most enticing scent, so I cut off a few of sprigs and brought them inside for an infusion. I trimmed the needles into a bowl, poured in a sample amount of vodka, and let it sit over night.

The result? Very strong, true spruce flavor and aroma. Enough so that I repeated the process and sacrificed half the bottle of True North to another batch and after several experiments landed on the following Yoopertini. (As much as I hate the trend of tacking “-tini” onto whatever foul concoction pops into a bartender’s head, since this drink is actually derived from a classic martini I’m making an exception.) Here’s how it goes:

1.5 oz True North spruce-infused vodka
3/4 oz True North cherry vodka
3/4 oz dry vermouth
2 dashes orange bitters

Stir over ice and strain into a martini glass. No, the Cedarville liquor store doesn’t carry orange bitters. Those were one of the few things I packed. Vermouth and orange bitters aren’t locally made, but with the vodkas and the spruce we have three purely local ingredients. It’s not, perhaps, the best drink I could make with spruce vodka and a full bar to work with, but it’s still pretty good and it aptly captures the taste of Northern Michigan in the summer.

Added bonus: After drinking several variations on this, I realized it would probably be a good idea to make sure that there’s nothing toxic about spruce trees. Turns out that the shoots of many spruces are a source of vitamin C and that Captain Cook used spruce beer to protect his crew against scurvy. So between this drink and homemade tonic water, I’m warding off all kinds of diseases that I have virtually no chance of catching anyway. To health!

In a rare win for good sense, the TTB has reversed its earlier decision and is now allowing Mt. Shasta Brewing Co., based in Weed, CA, to use its slogan “Try Legal Weed” on its bottle caps. Regulators decided that, given the rest of the packaging, consumers would not be misled by the motto.

[Via Slashfood.]

Richard Posner makes an interesting point about a court’s refusal to honor Leona Helmsley’s bequest of a full $12 million* to her dog, Trouble:

As I said, a bequest for a specified animal that greatly exceeds any conceivable estimate of what the animal needs to be as happy as it can be cannot be rationally altruistic, so perhaps the authority that the Uniform Trust Act confers on trustees to cut back such bequests to reasonable limits is justifiable–and for the additional reason that excessive wealth actually endangers an animal, since once it dies the money will go to residuary legatees; and killing an animal is not considered murder (though it can be a lesser crime) and is easier to arrange and conceal than killing a human being. Expensive security precautions have in fact been taken for the protection of Mrs. Helmsley’s dog. These concerns do not attend a bequest for a large class of animals.

On that note, here’s a few photos for Sunday dog blogging, an event I rarely get to participate in. The first two were taken by my sister, Casey, of our tennis ball-loving dog, Peekay, both of whom left Michigan just before I got here:

The approach…

… and the leap!

And here’s Chance the golden retriever entreating for less blogging, more playtime.

* $12 million. Not $12. Thanks, Ben!

Though I’m not sure I could stand behind all of it, I’m sympathetic to this column by Carol Hart expressing skepticism about the usefulness of mandated calorie counts:

Even the most rigorous attempts to come up with precise numbers for specific foods will fail because of the glorious complexity and natural variability of whole foods (and of the human beings who eat them). Foods are not stable combinations of discrete compounds, nor is the human body a machine that burns fuels in uniform accordance with physical laws.

For example, any sudden increase in fat intake can interfere with digestion of nutrients because the body will not have sufficient metabolic enzymes to deal with the surplus. Individuals may differ in their ability to digest specific nutrients, although this variation has not been much studied…

Numbers are easily misread or misinterpreted, a facet of consumer psychology that is regularly exploited by marketers and retailers in setting prices. If your $3.99 Subway Spicy Italian is listed at 480 calories rather than 500, you may perceive that number as four-something, and you may miss the fact that you have to multiply that by two in order to get the calorie count for the foot-long sub, which costs only $1.75 more. Ditto for your $4.99 Subway Melt with 380 calories. The over-reliance on numbers and labels in selecting foods is part of a larger issue that prescriptive nutritional advice, whether accurate or not, coaches people to regulate their eating by external tokens rather than by the internal and sensory cues that have served that purpose over millions of years of evolution.

I haven’t read Hart’s book, but I’m curious as to how she expects our evolved internal cues to be reliable given that we evolved in conditions of considerable scarcity relative to today’s cheap abundance. Her advice to think more about the whole foods that we eat rather than misleadingly precise counts of discrete nutritional elements, however, seems right on.

California is proposing to follow in New York City’s footsteps mandating calorie counts on chain restaurant menus, and as with smoking and trans fat bans, it’s likely that other jurisdictions will join them. Yet it’s still not clear that the mandates will do any good; they’re driven more by a classist desire to make fast food unattractive than by solid evidence of their efficacy. As Gary Becker says, “To better understand this movement against fast foods, one has to appreciate first of all that many individuals do not like fat persons.”

Before other states and cities jump on this bandwagon, they should give some study to the costs and benefits of New York’s mandate.

Previously:
The $10,000 pizza delivery
Doubts on calorie counts

If the worst thing that the scolds at the Center for Science in the Public Interest can say about coffee is that it unfortunately doesn’t help with weight loss, than you know it must be good for you. Drink up!

[Thanks to Caleb for the link.]

From The Times:

In 1977, the former Miss Wyoming stalked her lover, a Mormon missionary, to a tabernacle in East Ewell, Surrey, allegedly kidnapped him and held him in a cottage in Devon. There, the 17-stone Kirk Anderson claimed, his petite, busty admirer tied him to a bed using mink-trimmed handcuffs, slipped into a see-through nightie and forced him into sex. At a remand hearing she declared her love for the Mormon with the immortal line: “I’d ski naked down Mount Everest with a carnation up my nose if he asked me.”

Her counsel told magistrates: “Me-think the Mormon doth protest too much. You have seen the size of Mr Anderson and you have seen the size of my client.” To flee on bail, she donned a red wig and disguised herself as a member of a mime troupe, together with her alleged accomplice, Keith May. No extradition warrant was issued. William Hucklesby, the detective who led the inquiry, said: “My own view is that we were well rid of her.”

And believe it or not, the story just gets weirder from there. Could this finally inspire a suitable villain for the next Batman movie?

An IHT article about a new spa in Alexandria that lets customers soak their feet in a pool of tiny carp hungry for dead human skin notes that “state regulations make no provision for regulating fish pedicures.” This is Virginia, just give them time! Swimming pool regulations did kick in however:

“But the county health department — which does regulate pools — required the salon to switch from a shallow, tiled communal pool that served as many as eight people to individual tanks in which the water is changed for each customer.”

Thank goodness they were on the case.

[Via Tom.]

Previously:
Sticking it to the manicure

If you have a clear night and not much light pollution (like I currently do in the UP), you can spot the International Space Station with the naked eye. NASA publishes a schedule of up-to-the-minute sighting times here. It looks like a bright, quickly moving star without magnification, taking 1-4 minutes to pass overhead. With magnification, it’s possible to capture an impressive level of detail. A cool thing to notice if you look up at the right time.

Like my friend Chad, I was too busy last week to weigh in on the debate over the ban on new fast food restaurants in South L.A. William Saletan of Slate does a good job taking on the idea that this is just another kind of zoning and that we libertarians should stop getting our collective undies in a knot over it:

When an old practice ventures into new territory, you can always choose to look at it as the same old thing. But in this case, the novelty of the application is what’s interesting. Most cities have long zoned liquor stores, and some have zoned chain restaurants for reasons other than health, such as tackiness. What’s new in L.A. is the zoning of fast food as a health threat akin to liquor. Health zoning has crossed the line from booze and cigarettes to food. This goes way beyond tackiness. In principle, it justifies banning the targeted restaurants not just here or there but everywhere…

This comparison has played a central role in the campaign for the moratorium. And it’s a crucial comparison, because it justifies and, to some extent, obscures a huge step: telling food merchants that they may not open any new outlets in certain neighborhoods because their kind of food is inherently unhealthy…

So if you’re going to start prohibiting certain kinds of food outlets, fast food is a logical food to target, southern L.A. is a logical place to do it (though I still think segregated food zoning as a solution to “food apartheid” is twisted), and one year is a logical introductory period. That’s what makes the L.A. ordinance worth debating: It presents the most tempting case for crossing the line to restrict food like cigarettes or whiskey. But you still have to decide whether to cross that line—and where you’ll stop once you do.

Read the whole thing here. I would add one other difference between traditional zoning and what the L.A. council is doing. As a default, we should leave the decision over what kinds of businesses open in a neighborhood to the interplay of entrepreneurs and customers. Legitimate zoning steps in to shore up externalities. So, for example, it’s understandable that we might want to restrict late night bars from opening if the noise they produce would adversely impact nearby residents. Or some businesses might be restricted because of their impact on traffic. More dubiously, neighborhoods might forbid chains because they have no community character. In all of these cases it’s the broader, external effects of the businesses that are being addressed. With the fast food ban, in contrast, the L.A. council is forbidding businesses to open for the good of the customers who would patronize them. That’s a major line to cross, and one that libertarians are justified in opposing.

(Yes, one could argue that the public health costs of obesity are a relevant externality. But that’s not a problem local to L.A., not addressed by this narrow ban, and a slippery slope I’d prefer not to go down.)

This classified ad sounds promising:

New cafe opening in cool part of DC needs a serious barista to help establish and oversee coffee operations. Looking for someone passionate about coffee-coffee making as a craft. We intend on serving the finest ristretto shot in the District. Duties include consulting with owner/operator on equipment purchase, hiring of other talented baristas, and helping to determine overall feel of cafe. not your ordinary coffee shop.

Sounds like my friends at Cato might have an option better than Starbucks in the near future.