DRUNK HISTORY

New Year's Eve is a drinking holiday, let's face it. We drink and look back at the year and succumb to weepy sentimentality or forced hilarity--sometimes in the middle of the same sentence. The trouble is, every bar in town is packed with amateurs. People who have no business drinking feel obligated to celebrate the passing of the year with copious amounts of booze. You can see them a mile away. Twenty-two year olds clutching their IDs, ordering sucker drinks with naughty names, getting all lizard-eyed and nauseous, calling each other "dude!"


Hey, is that you? Stay home. Keep the roads clear. It's even cheaper drinking at home, and you can mix your own Screaming Orgasms, Fuzzy Navels, and Flaming Velvet Buttcheeks. Stay home and drink and dial. It's easy. Drink and feel sorry for yourself and call up old friends. Drink and dial, you pathetic loser. Or better yet, drink and email. Take the cowardly path, the walk of shame. Better yet, drink and pass out in front of the TV while watching Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve. That is just too sad. Dick Clark is as old as Methuselah and he looks exactly the same as he ever did so he probably made a deal with the devil or he has a portrait of himself growing old in the cellar. Anyway, pass out pondering such heavy thoughts while watching Dick Clark and some shitty eighties band of fat guys in skinny neckties but be sure you place the bucket near your head before you nod off.


"Drunk History" is a video that has worked it's way around the web. This poor drunk has a story to tell, and he does pretty well with the help of Michael Cera, the star of Juno and practically every other movie this year. Watch and learn something.

Cheers!

THE PERFECT MARTINI

Bourbon and Scotch are great drinks for the winter months, but the seasons are changing and it's eighty degrees outside and I'm drinking a martini. It's perfect. I love a good vodka martini, don't get me wrong, but this is classic gin and it couldn't be better. Despite huge ad campaigns, vodkas tend to be similar, since they're basically pure distilled alcohol, whereas gins vary widely because they're made with juniper berries and a variety of botanicals. Take this Bombay Sapphire. The flavoring comes from ten different ingredients: almond, lemon peel, licorice, juniper berries, orris root, angelica, coriander, cassia, cubeb, and grains of paradise.

Gin was invented by Franciscus Sylvius, a doctor in the Netherlands in the 17th century. It was originally sold to treat medical problems such as gout, gallstones, and lumbago. Jenever, Genever, or Dutch Gin, was different than what we drink today. It was made in a single pot, and tasted much stronger. When William of Orange ascended the British throne, he brought along a love of gin. Soon there was six times as much gin as beer in London. London Dry gin, made from a single column still, gained a wide popularity, especially with the poor, since it was cheap to produce. Soon there would be gin blossoms, gin rummy, and bathtub gin.

London Dry gin bottle, 1800s

As you know, the Brits drank gin and tonics to stave off malaria in their far-flung empire, hence the allusion to Bombay in this drink I'm sipping, though the Bombay Sapphire brand was actually launched in 1987. Even so, it's crisp, cold, and aromatic. I'm not complaining.

As for the martini, the New York Times says it was invented in 1912 by Signor Martini di Arma di Taggia, bartender at New York's Knickerbocker Hotel. Some say there are earlier published reports of the drink.

According to Wikipedia, real martini drinkers drank it dry. The drier the better. The classic drink calls for a five-to-one ratio of gin to dry vermouth, but for some that wasn't dry enough. Winston Churchill chose to skip the vermouth completely, saying that the perfect martini involved pouring a glass full of cold gin and looking at a bottle of vermouth. General George Patton suggested pointing the gin bottle in the general direction of Italy. Alfred Hitchcock called for five parts gin and "a quick glance at a bottle of vermouth." Hemingway liked to order a "Montgomery", which was a martini mixed at a 15:1 gin-to-vermouth ratio (these supposedly being the odds Field Marshall Montgomery wanted to have before going into battle). That's dry.

With the advent of lounge culture nostalgia, martinis are big again. Maybe it's the cool glass. Maybe it's Shagg. In the 1990s, vodka martinis surpassed gin martinis in popularity. Nowadays you can order martinis -- or concoctions masquerading as martinis -- made with everything from chocolate to apples to bananas. Tini Bigs, a martini bar in Seattle, serves a "Smore," which is a chocolate martini with crushed graham cracker on the rim. I kid you not. That's no longer a martini. That is something vile and pernicious.

Anyway, for a cool summer drink when you're tired of beer and gin and tonics, try a martini. Or a Montgomery! Salute!

''I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.'' - Hunter S. Thompson.