Bud Talkinghorn's Random Thoughts

Jacob Richler is right; they are ruining gin

Jacob should have seen it coming. Coffee was desecrated long before. Chocolate-mint mocha? I don't think so. I even gave up diluting my coffee with milk. Richler posits in his National Post column that gin is the latest victim of the "perfume" plague. When I was a kid, my favourite booze was Gooderham and Worts lemon-lime gin. It was supposed to be diluted with water and ice, but I liked it straight. Can't let anything get between me and that sugar/alcohol high. I was a kid then; since then, I have put away childish things (well, most of them anyway). Now I want that pure juniper hit. A proper gin and tonic is a one-to-one ratio concoction. It is not a slurpy.

I now notice that the liquor store stocks their candy shots right next to the cash register. "They're a huge seller", the female cashier assured me. First we had "lite" beer, which blurred the line between water and malt. Then along came the coolers. The distillers understood the "liquor is quicker" truism. Next thing you know, regular-looking guys are pushing Mike's Hard Lemonade across the check-out counter. "For the little lady, you understand," he claims. True, but she might have to arm-wrestle for it. Don't forget. these regular guys are former fans of the slurppy too. I suspect that there are thousands of these folk out there, who secretly are sipping their Key West Rasberry Zombie, while lisening to Jimmy Buffett. Start hoarding those unadulterated Gordon's Gin bottles. When all you get is Gordon's Cranberry Gin, they will be priceless.

© Bud Talkinghorn--Maybe they should start adding artificial favours to that Lite beer; might help disguise that water taste.


For the sad parade of blacks at the New Orleans Convention center

Black Tambourine--1926

The interests of a black man in a cellar
Mark tardy judgment on the world's closed door.
Gnats toss in the shadow of a bottle
And a roach spans a crevice in the floor.

The black man, forlorn in the cellar,
Wanders in some mid-kingdom, dark, that lies,
Between his tambourine, stuck on the wall
And, in Africa, a carcass quick with flies.

Hart Crane

And for the Liberals, incapable of shame, but fueled by o'er-weaning arrogance

Spare a moment for the stay-at-home voter
The Salt of the Earth confronted by a parade
of grey-suited grafters, offering you the choice between
Cancer and polio

Mick Jagger--"The Salt of the Earth"

And for the usual liberal media suspects

"And above the everlasting murmur of the woods and rivers
And more insistent than the lulling answers of the waltz.
The hum of printing presses turning forests into lies."

W.H. Auden

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