Slate Sips Vodka

Hit Me With Your Best Shot - Which vodka is the best? By Alex Abramovich

Slate concludes that despite being made primarily of water and alcohol, not all vodkas are created equal:

But if all vodkas tasted alike, there'd be no reason to favor a $30 bottle of Armadale over a $12 magnum of Fleischmann's. In fact, all vodkas are not alike. Vodka can be distilled in a good many ways, from a great many substances, including wheat, rye, beets, corn, potatoes, and sugar cane. (In Russia, the Yukos oil conglomerate recently made headlines for marketing a vodka distilled from hemp seeds.) As a result, each brand has a distinct smell, flavor, aftertaste, and burn (i.e., the burning sensation vodka creates as it goes down your gullet). The grain-based vodkas, which are the most popular, tend to be smooth and can even taste fruity. Vegetable-based vodkas are often (and often unfairly) dismissed as being harsh and medicinal.

My Russian neighbor prefers Absolut, which was rated surprisingly low. Second place, however, went to a Scottish vodka, Armadale, distilled on the Isle of Skye.

The Post Reflects on Chalmers Roberts

The Chal Roberts Story (washingtonpost.com)

Chal's article of Saturday illustrated a 93-year-old mind that works as well as anyone's, at any age. Those who know him, and the thousands of older Post readers who read his work so often, could only wish for many more decades of Chal. But the same friends and readers can only admire the qualities he brought to his decision, the same toughness and lack of sentimentality that have served us all so uniquely and so well.

For better or worse, toughness and lack of sentimentality are what we prize in our reporters. To be fair, the Post also lauds Roberts' "fairness, intelligence, and nuanced judgment."

Death Be Not Proud

The Decision of a Lifetime (washingtonpost.com)

I could be dead when you read this. But I thought it might be worthwhile to put down my thoughts about how I decided to skip a lifesaving heart operation.

Chalmers Roberts lived life on his own terms. Now, by refusing a potentially life-saving operation, he is preparing to die on his own terms. Few of us could ask for better.

The Gibson Monument

As we enjoyed dinner at a very fine Spanish restaurant in Washington, one of my companions brought up my (remote) Scottish ancestry, and the discussion quickly turned to Braveheart. I have always thought it amusing that outside the visitors center at the Wallace Monument in Stirling there is a statue of William Wallace, rendered to look exactly like Mel Gibson. The explanation I was given was that since no one knows what Wallace really looked like, why not make him look like Mel Gibson? (We do know, from the Wallace sword, that Wallace must have been taller than Gibson).

As for Mr. Gibson's more recent career, I do not really hold it against him. However, I find it hard to understand how a religious person like Gibson reconciles the imitation of Christ with a career based on extreme movie violence. I do not consider myself a very religious person, but I have never thought that the main point of Christ's life and teachings was the brutality of his death.

The Evils of TV

The television is more evil than the computer (Jeremy Zawodny's blog)

In our family debates, I generally espouse the point of view expressed by Jeremy Zawodny, but there is clearly another side to the argument that TV is simply evil.

I have enjoyed watching the Olympics on the television; I don't think that I would enjoy gymnastics as much on the computer. While I watched the Olympics, I could cuddle up with my wife and daughter on the couch. This does not work well at the keyboard; in fact, taking the baby to the computer is an invitation to a tantrum. Once we have finished watching a program together, it is often the subject of a discussion. This happens less frequently with the computer, which caters to our divergent more than our common interests.

Finally, as Zawodny's practice of turning on the iTunes at the keyboard suggests, one tends to tune out in front of the CRT, minimizing interaction with other people. Anyone who uses a computer is clearly aware that it can become obsessive. I have never been accused of ignoring someone because I was watching television, but occasionally people have suggested that I should pay more attention to them and less to the computer.

For myself, I would cheerfully dispense with a television, but not at the expense of social relationships with my family.

A Disappointing Footnote

Paul Hamm apparently earned his all-around gold medal in gymnastics as a result of a scoring error. The medal is likely to stand because the South Koreans, who should have won, did not issue a timely protest. Sometimes a storybook ending is too good to be true.

America's Preferred Form of Invidious Distinction

Harvard, Princeton Tied in News Rankings (washingtonpost.com)

Perhaps a playoff is in order. For the second straight year, Harvard and Princeton share the top spot in the controversial U.S. News & World Report rankings of "America's Best Colleges."

Yale is number 3, and the University of Pennsylvania is number 4. Harvard had nothing to say for itself (but is no doubt secretly chagrined over having to share the glory with the pumpkinheads.)

Good Girls Do?

Blog Interrupted (washingtonpost.com)

When Jessica Cutler put her dirty secrets on the Web, she lost her job, signed a book deal, posed for Playboy -- and raised a ton of questions about where America is headed.

Cutler apparently first started her blog so that her girlfriends could keep her sexploits with six "boyfriends" straight. She described her affairs to her friends for laughs.

In addition to an unashamed promiscuity, Cutler, according to the Post, has also casually experimented with a wide range of illegal substances, is chronically unable to keep a job, and was "inaccurate" on her resume about such details as whether she had actually graduated from college.

The Post's interest in the story — apart from its obviously titilallating details about sex in corridors of power — seems to be based on the question: "Is this the new norm for young women today?" The Post suggests, citing Naomi Wolf, that sexual liberation and the push for equal rights have led to a commoditization of sex among young women that apes the worst of men's traditional attittudes.

The story also has a moral: don't write anything on your blog that you would not want your boss, your significant other, or your parents to read.

All that Jazz

I caught Friday Night Jazz at Borders at 18th and L, N.W. tonight. The great thing was that the four person combo — trumpet, piano, bass, and drums — wasn't a regular group even though they sounded like one. They were just four musicians who get together a couple of times a year to play.