Category: Alcohol

One Day Till Election Day

James Ashley

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The most important thing about making a Moscow Mule is getting the cup right. It needs to be copper, which does good things with the lime juice. Don’t use a silver cup, which is used a a container for the Mint Julep. To make a Moscow Mule my way, pour ice into a copper cup. Over the ice add:

  • 2 oz not too expensive vodka
  • 4 oz Moscow Mule mix
  • enough sparkling water to fill your copper cup to the rim

Garnish with a lime slice and mint sprig.

A few years ago I found myself with Dennis Vroegop at a LinkedIn Learning party in Redmond, Washington. It was there that we began negotiations on what eventually became our App Development for HoloLens video course. It was November 3rd, 2016  during the week of the Microsoft MVP summit and the free bar had an excellent mixologist who was able to make me a Rusty Nail as well as a Moscow Mule. I was thrilled.

As the night wore on, we went from party to party with a great sense of freedom and the feeling that we were on top of the world and that we were on the cusp of great things. Another friend, Tamas Deme, ended up at a dour affair for the local Republican Party where depressed representatives waited patiently for bad news.

But that isn’t how things turned out. As we moved from party to party, people started getting panicked phone calls from spouses at home and their faces turned from bemusement to chagrin. At one point we ran into Tim Huckaby, a legend in the Microsoft RD world, who told us Trump was winning the election. We thought he was joking.

Finally my wife called me in tears barely able to contain herself. The country had elected (another) rapist and she couldn’t understand how. I couldn’t get my head around it and ended up walking around Redmond for the next few hours.

Instead of the best year, 2016 became the start of a set of strange, difficult to understand events. Everything feels like it has slowly been dissipating ever since. Friendships have become strained. Relationships have frayed. The extended, non-nuclear family is maintained by avoiding each other. I constantly have to tell my children that this isn’t how things used to be and politicians as well as people in general traditionally are afraid of being caught in lies. But I can tell from their tone that they doubt me. After all, isn’t my generation partly responsible for what has happened?

Two Days Till The Election

James Ashley

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The Sidecar is a somewhat neglected concoction, being a brandy-based cocktail that doesn’t fit into the common categories of brown, clear and beach drinks. The most important thing is to wet the tip of your martini glass with water before dipping it in sugar and chilling it in the freezer. To make a sidecar, shake:

  • 2 oz brandy
  • 2 oz triple sec or other orange liqueur
  • 1 1/2 oz fresh squeezed lemon juice

The base of a cocktail (brandy, whiskey, gin, vodka, rum or tequila) is a bit like a Kuhnian paradigm that casts an interpretive shadow over whatever else you add to it. If you add lime juice and simple syrup to rum you get a Daiquiri. When you add lime juice and simple syrup to gin, you end up with a Gimlet. Garnishes also provide a gravitational pull of their own. Dry vermouth, gin and olives gives you a martini. Dry vermouth, gin and cocktail onions makes a Gibson. Replace gin with vodka and you end up with either a vodka Martini or a vodka Gibson (emphasizing that vodka, being a clear alcohol like gin, is a mere variation rather than a species change). Gin, sweet vermouth and bitters gives you a Martinez, a drink that the Martini is apparently descended from. Bourbon, sweet vermouth and bitters is a Manhattan. Replace the Manhattan’s vermouth with simple syrup and you get an Old-Fashioned. Add mint leaves to this and you have a Mint Julep.

Herodotus tells us that the Persians always deliberated over important issues once drunk and once sober, to ensure they captured all the aspects of the matter with clarity but also with an open mind so that, matatis mutandis, good outcomes were achieved. The surprise is always in how different moods can affect our judgment which we otherwise assume is firm and built on unmoving principles. It is why decisions should never be made in haste or in a moment of high passion. And if we do this anyways, there is much to be said for a process that allows review, so that mistakes made in the moment can be fixed.

But due process, like brandy cocktails, is not currently in vogue, and it is difficult to tell if this is a result of changing perspectives on what justice entails – or if this is merely a momentary passion.

Three Days Out From Election Day

James Ashley


The White Russian is famously the drink of The Dude. It is a three ingredient cocktail composed of equal parts vodka, Kahlua and heavy white_russiancream. No garnish. I prefer it in an Oculus Rift novelty glass, but any old-fashioned glass will do.

My wife’s grand-parents and great-grandparents were White Russians. In the 1918 revolution her family retreated and retreated with the Tsarist forces through the Ukraine. Her great-great-grandfather and a cousin iconically died when their regiment was surrounded by the Reds in the snow. The Reds did not take prisoners. To be fair, the Whites didn’t either. And both took advantage of the war to act out pogroms on Jews, whom neither side trusted.

One of her great grand-fathers was sent to the Gulag for a 5 year term for blowing up a bridge. If the bridge actually existed, family opinion holds that his sentence would have been much more severe. Later, after walking home following the end of his 5 years in Siberia, he took advantage of the war to gather his family and escape from the Ukraine to Germany. German fliers had promised them a great life if they migrated west. Instead, the Germans placed them in a labor camp, where they stayed through the extent of the war. Once the guards had left the camp, they made their way to  allied forces and eventually were granted passage to New York City, where they lived for several years before settling in the suburbs around Washington, D.C.

Their take-away from all this was that the Nazis were bad but the Soviets were worse.

I recently discovered that my mother is voting for Trump. I was a bit surprised, but not completely. My mother is Vietnamese and there are complicated factors involved which come down to: 1) a specific distrust of the Chinese, who in the past and currently are attempting to create a sphere of influence in that part of the world, especially as the Trump administration has withdrawn from foreign engagement; 2) anti-communism that grows out of a long history of communist atrocities in Vietnam as well as the trauma of being expelled from one’s own country and being forced to leave both family and ancestral graves behind; 3) Trump has been successful in portraying himself as being tough on China, despite general indifference to the plight of the Uyghurs or of the independence movement in Hong Kong.

The horror of communism is the basic belief in the plasticity of human nature and the belief that with proper education, reinforced with force if necessary,  anybody can be made to believe anything. Combine this with an absolute belief in the righteousness of one’s cause as well as a cadre of cynical operators willing to carry out this political agenda, and you end up with the sort of destruction of norms and truth illustrated in the writings of George Orwell and  Alexander Solzhenitsyn, films like The Death of Stalin, and the growing testimony about the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

But as strongly as I abhor the anti-humanism and anti-enlightenment baggage of communist movements (or maybe because of it) it is clear that a general sympathy for the working person, a desire to help those in need and an recognition of the need to address the consequences of global warming are not the essence of communism. The essence of communism is a disregard for truth and a belief that anyone can be made to believe anything and that norms are a weakness. These are not the traits of a Biden presidential candidacy.

Drinking down my White Russian, I coo privately over the prospect of Biden presidential victory and begin to confuse the two.

Sam Elliott tells us in The Big Lebowski that The Dude was the right man at the right time (which is also a perfect description of Joe Biden). The Dude has many faults. Among his virtues, though, is a degree of appreciation for what he expects from the world and a respect for norms. He is surrounded by somewhat extreme friends, but he also gives them space and grants them their personal dignity and recognizes their humanity. For all his 60’s radical rhetoric, he is ultimately a man of bourgeois tastes pursuing enlightenment ideals about interior decoration with a clear sense of human dignity and of what crosses the line of human dignity.

These are hard times and we need more Dude’s in the world. We also need more White Russians over here, bartender!

Four Days From Election Day

James Ashley

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This is the Aviation cocktail. It is one of the earliest recorded cocktails of the 20th century. Just sourcing the ingredients can be a feat in itself.

  • 2 oz gin
  • 1/2 oz lemon juice
  • 1/4 oz maraschino liqueur
  • 1/4 oz creme de violette

Shake with ice and pour into a martini glass. Garnish with a lemon twist or a maraschino cherry. There is some controversy about the creme de violette. Some people leave it out altogether, on the theory that modern versions of the liqueur are inferior to that used in the original drink. Some throw it in with the rest of the ingredients in the shaker, which creates a very purple drink. I like to add it over a spoon after pouring the glass so it is in a separate layer, creating a morning dawn with clouds effect, which is how the drink originally got its name.

The disputes over the right way to make an Aviation follow a long term (or long form) mode of thought. This is unusual and increasingly rare. Typically we make short term decisions, and this has been blamed many of the follies we face today.

Stock market investment is meant to be a long term matter but many of the disasters that occur in the market seem to occur when people treat it as a short form (i.e. gambling) metier. There was a time, as with the characters in a Jane Austen novel, when a person’s worth was calculated based on a 5% return on investments. Mr. Darcy was worth 10,000 pounds a year, which meant he had an endowment of 200,000 pounds. 10,000 pounds a year put Mr. Darcy in the top 1% of British incomes at the time. His 10,000 pounds is equivalent to around £450,000 today, according to a quick unverified Google search I just did. His modern equivalent, I imagine, would consequently be Jared Kushner, not Colin Firth, which makes Ivanka Trump our Elizabeth Bennett!

Okay. Enough of that.  Short term thinking vs. long term thinking. That is the current topic.

I once had a manager to whom I expressed my concerns that the path we were on in building a software product simply wouldn’t work. There was no audience for it. I was concerned that my manager was hiding information from the CEO of the company and that this would lead to disaster down the road, including but not limited to everyone losing their jobs. My manager calmly told me with a smile that this was something I shouldn’t worry about and that if his strategy didn’t work, it was his job that would be forfeit, not mine.

I think he was sincere in saying this, to the extent any manager is capable of sincerity (I’ve known a few), but the problem was that this was short term thinking. In the short term, he was confident that what he was saying was true. Later, however, adverse circumstances led to a shortfall in income and I moved on to other employment while he continued doing internal pitches in order to get more money for his project. He of course forgot about any claims he had made previously.

There are several lessons that can be drawn from this. The first is never to trust  management. They are not on your side. Their job is to figure out how to get you to further their own goals.

The second is that something said can be true in the short term but not true in the long term. In the short term, people will say whatever gets them through to the end of the meeting they are in. This is what we also call a pragmatic attitude.

Statements concerning actions that are true over the long term are actually called “ethics”. When someone claims they will do something, and perhaps believe it, but after a few days or a few weeks, abandons that promise, then they are being unethical. If the keep to their word over the long term, they are being ethical. A characteristic of people who keep their word over the long term is that they are thoughtful about what they say and what they promise.

Even the beliefs we hold can be ethical or unethical in this way. I was once serving jury duty in a case that was pretty fun – about which I can’t really say anything. Most of the jury was inclined one way while two were inclined another. At the end of the deliberations, one of the hold outs was eventually ready to change his vote because he had a party he wanted to go to that night. So it was down to the fore-person. She made multiple arguments about how it was possible that the person on trial may not have done what he was accused of. And honestly her intentions were good. She was concerned about the three-strikes mandate that at the time would have given the defendant an excessive punishment, and many juries at the time were struggling with the notion of jury nullification in cases where they felt the criminal justice system itself was unfair. It occurred to me to ask her, out of curiosity, whether she believed what she was saying.

After which there was a long pause of at least a minute and maybe more. She then announced that she was changing her vote and we returned to the courtroom to announce our verdict.

“Is that true” is a powerful question, I discovered that day.

In life, we all say things that sound good at the moment. When I supported pitches to the client while working at a digital agency, this was what we did every day. We said things that sounded good. Strangely, we always believed what we were saying when we said it. Following the George Costanza rule, it isn’t a lie if you believe it.

But what we believe in the moment isn’t the same thing as an ‘ethical belief’. It can be blamed on social media, the lowering of public discourse, the long term effects of Trumpism, but it feels like people no longer believe or speak ethically anymore. There is no sense that the things we say should be true or that the promises we made should be kept. It’s all just words …

And words can destroy lives, markets, norms,  social bonds and potentially great nations. My hope for the Biden presidency is that we will finally have ethical beliefs, again.

Five Days from Election Day

James Ashley

cocktail

This is the Man-O-War, named after the race horse. Lemon juice gives it a brilliant cheerful tone. To make it, shake over ice cubes:

  • 2 oz bourbon
  • 1 ounce orange liqueur (or triple sec)
  • 1/2 oz sweet vermouth
  • 1/2 oz fresh squeezed lemon juice

Garnish with a lemon twist and a brandied cherry (or a maraschino cherry).

Cocktails for the most part were invented as a way to dress up poor quality liquor during prohibition. The desire to have a more sober and then a more drunk public were the proximate causes for the 19th and 21st amendments. In between these two amendments, in apparently a period when the government went crazy with ratification craze, the 20th amendment got rid of the lame duck presidency.

Prohibition contributed to a rise in organized crime, dedicated to providing a class of drug users narcotics that they could no longer attain legally.

(Please excuse me for any spelling or grammar or usage mistakes. I’ve been drinking a Man-O-War, which is a fabulous drink. Support your local liquor store and buy some tasty liquor.)

The upside of the progressive increase in violence and a social example of the imposition of a Hobbesian world on top of modernity was the creation of the cocktail culture – meant to offset the bad taste of imported cheap alcohol. On the one had, the best cocktails can be made with the best alcohol. On the other hand, why ruin a perfectly good Japanese whiskey with fruit?

Anyhoo, we got a first wave of cocktail culture, meant to elevate bad tasting alcohol with additives, because of the 19th amendment. There was another wave post-pohibition with the Tiki-bar movement, promulgated by a post-war, Disney-like desire to recreate the world to specifications. And a third wave in the 70’s which was punk-like and weird and cool.

The great thing about cocktails is that they tell a story around the raw benefit of alcohol to make you feel temporarily euphoric. The narrative of the cocktail, depending on whether it works for you or not, is that it extends the euphoria beyond the immediate bio-chemical effect and creates a decadent romance around the rituals of the cocktail.

Which brings me back to the election. Alcohol is a necessity to get us through the next 5 days. Those traumatized by the election of 2016 are never going to feel confident about Biden’s clear electorial lead going into the 2020 election in 5 days.

In a temporary, drug induced level of empathy for Trump voters, I would add that those surprised and then forced to accept as pre-determined the election of the Republican victory in 2016 also will need a stiff drink to get over the false-consciousness they are currently experiencing. The bad high will soon be over and they will need to accommodate themselves to the fact that it was a horrible mistake they didn’t mean to sign on to. My good-faith advice, which you won’t take, is to write a publish a mea-culpa about why Trump was a mistake and a violation of your personal principles. Give Hosannas to Jesus Christ instead of Trump. Drink if you need to and hit publish on Medium about what a disaster this has all been. Because anything you say after the election will not matter. (And, mundis-mutandi, you can always delete afterwards if affairs go differently and claim you were hacked. But we all already know how the election is going.)

I’ve the lost the thread of this post other than fresh lemon juice dramatically improves any cocktail. Fresh juice is the secret principle of the 70’s rediscovery of 50’s Tiki cocktails. I will try to publish more secrets of fresh juice added to alcohol in the next few days.

The other thread, I think, is that the misery and violence that sprung from the 19th amendment had, as a positive result, the invention of the cocktail sub-genre. That’s all I’m saying, man.

It’s Miller Time

James Ashley2 Comments

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When it’s time to relax, when it’s time to celebrate, it’s time to break open the champagne of beers. 

Today I began my new career as a Magenic Technologies consultant.  I first became acquainted with Magenic through my work a few years ago with the CSLA framework which, during a time when business objects were all the rage, was one of the few technologies that implemented the concept well.  Even better, the framework dovetailed perfectly with the emerging interest in code generation, and all of the major code generators, de rigueur, are obliged to support templates for CSLA due to its central place in the development of the field.  After all, what’s the point of having a code generator if you don’t know what you are going to build with it?

CSLA is the brainchild of Rocky Lhotka, whose book Visual Basic 6 Business Objects not only introduced many VB programmers, including myself, to the world of Object Oriented programming, but probably helped pave the way for the later success of C#.  Rocky Lhotka, in turn, is a principal consultant for Magenic.

If any of these claims seems a bit grandiose, I suppose it is fair to say that I am somewhat partisan at this point — though I feel confident that had I written this yesterday, I would have said much the same.  And since I have in effect attempted what is commonly referred to as a "full disclosure", I might also add that Magenic has a reputation for having some of the smartest people doing software development today — which begs the question of why they hired me, but I’ll leave that for a later post … maybe …

The only fly in my vocational ointment is the fact that Bill Ryan, with whom I was looking forward to working, who actually tech interviewed me for the consulting position and helped me to get the job, is now leaving Magenic.  For some reason I had gotten it into my mind that he would mentor me in the ways of the modern software consultant, would guide me through my first book writing venture, would lead me through the dazzling new technologies coming out of Redmond — but instead he is heading off to form a (undoubtedly successful) consulting business of his own in South Carolina.

And if I now come across as a bit lugubrious, it is probably due to the fact that I am somewhat tipsy.  Not from Miller High Life, however — a noxious beverage, all things considered, which cannot hold a candle to the fine brews I lived on for a year in Central Europe.  Instead I’m drinking a lovely distillation my wife bought for me for Christmas: Labrot and Graham’s Woodford Reserve Distiller’s Select Kentucky Straight Bourbon.  I horde it like a miser, only bringing it out for special occasions, drinking it neat with a splash of water, rather than iced down as I normally do with whiskey.  It’s just too good to be wasted due to the dissipation of melted ice.  While I’m on the topic of distilled liquors, I might also recommend Chopin Potato Vodka, for those who have a taste for it.  It is best served fresh out of the freezer, to give it the proper syrupy quality, poured into a tall shot glass, and thrown down the hatch with a toast and a chaser.

Here’s to the changing of the seasons, to the friends we might have made, and to the friends we hope to make.

Drinking with the Immortals

James Ashley1 Comment

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There are various legends about drinking with the Immortals.  They typically involve a wanderer lost in the wilderness who is offered shelter by strange people.  He is brought close to the fire and given beer, or wine, or mead, depending on the provenance of the folktale.  As his clothes dry out, he is regaled by tales of ancient times and slowly comes to realize that his companions are not typical folk, but rather denizens from behind the veil.  He has fallen, through no merit of his own, into the midst of an enchanted world, and his deepest fear is not of the danger that is all around him, but rather that once the enchantment is disspelled, he will never be able to recover it again.


It occurred to me recently that I had such an experience about a year ago.  I was sent by my company to the Microsoft campus in Redmond to spend several days with the ASP.NET Team and other luminaries of the .NET world.


The names will mean nothing to most readers, but I had the opportunity to meet Bertrand LeRoy, Scott Guthrie, Eilon Lipton, and others to discuss the (then new) ASP.NET Ajax.  I had been painfully working through the technology for several months, and so found myself able to almost hold a conversation with these designers and developers.


On the final night of the event all the seminar attendees were taken to a local wine bar and had dinner.  As is my wont, I drank as much free wine as was poured into my glass, and began spinning computer yarns that became more and more disassociated from reality as the night wore on.  I’m sure I became rather boorish at some point, but the Microsoft developers listened politely, and in my own mind, of course, I was making brilliant conversation.


Even to those who know something of the people I was talking to, this might seem like no big deal.  I went drinking with colleagues in the same industry I am in — so what.  But for me, it was as if I were suddenly introduced to the people who make the rain that nourishes my fields and the sunlight that warms my days.  Microsoft software simply appears as if by magic out of Redmond, and like millions of others, day in and day out, I dutifully learn and use the new technologies that come out of the software giant.  To find out that there are actually people who design the various tools I use, and build them, and debug them — this is a bit difficult to conceive.


In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf reflects on Charles Lamb’s encounter with a dog-eared manuscript of one of Milton’s poems, filled with lines scratched out and re-written, words selected and words discarded:



“Lamb then came to Oxbridge perhaps a hundred years ago. Certainly he wrote an essay-the name escapes me-about the manuscript of one of Milton’s poems which he saw here. It was LYCIDAS perhaps, and Lamb wrote how it shocked him to think it possible that any word in LYCIDAS could have been different from what it is. To think of Milton changing the words in that poem seemed to him a sort of sacrilege.”


My own discovery that the things of this world which I consider most solid and most real — because they are so essential to my daily life — could have been otherwise than they are, was a similar moment of shock, tinged with fear. 


In a moment of anxiety during this sweet symposium, I leaned over to the person immediately to my right and confided in him my strange reflections.  He laughed gently, and dismissed my drunken observations about the contingent nature of reality.  I later found out he was the twenty-three year old developer of the ASP.NET login control, used daily in web applications around the world, when he inquired of me whether I had ever used his control, and what I thought of it.

The Bond Martini

James Ashley3 Comments


 


We all know that James Bond drinks his martinis “shaken, not stirred.”  In the first Bond novel by Ian Fleming, we are actually given directions for making a very large martini, which Bond invents and later dubs ‘The Vesper,’ after Vesper Lynd, the heroine of Casino Royale. 


 




Bond insisted on ordering Leiter’s Haig-and-Haig ‘on the rocks’ and then he looked carefully at the barman.


‘A dry martini,’ he said. ‘One. In a deep champagne goblet.’



‘Oui, monsieur.’



‘Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet.  Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel. Got it?’



‘Certainly, monsieur.’ The barman seemed pleased with the idea.



‘Gosh, that’s certainly a drink,’ said Leiter.


Bond laughed. ‘When I’m … er … concentrating,’ he explained, ‘I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one drink to be large and very strong and very cold and very well-made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad. This drink’s my own invention. I’m going to patent it when I can think of a good name.’


He watched carefully as the deep glass became frosted with the pale golden drink, slightly aerated by the bruising of the shaker. He reached for it and took a long sip.


‘Excellent,’ he said to the barman, ‘but if you can get a vodka made with grain instead of potatoes, you will find it still better.’


‘Mais n’enculons pas des mouches,’ he added in an aside to the barman. The barman grinned.


‘That’s a vulgar way of saying “we won’t split hairs”,’ explained Bond.