#zhar-ptitsa

[soviet-furries]

The Little Humpbacked Horse (Конёк-горбунок)

Soyuzmultfilm, 1975

[aldieb]

24

24. Did you keep any New Year’s Resolutions?

my resolution was “always buy refundable tickets; make money; be a slut.” i give myself like a 2.25/3 on this. next year i intend to make less money and put more effort toward no-stakes hookups and thus balance will be maintained

end of year asks!

[crystallllines]

@strangebiology, me, and @zhar-ptitsa’s knee (my one regret is that we only got one real picture together with her face. but isn’t the bathing suit she gave me lovely?!)

anyhow, i had a lovely weekend. was able to pick up a copy of Jane Fonda’s Russian biography for @gittelspawn, as well as Zhanna Friske’s bio and a coloring book of rude/angry Russian stuff while we were all at Brighton Beach (which, for the record, is amazing when it’s daytime).

mommo sent pictures of clementine, too, so i’ll post those next.

[petermorwood]

Wait, Peter. Tell me more about this ... gin revival you speak of in the "medicine is just applied poison" post.

Well, it’s been going on - over here, anyway - for a few years now and shows no sign of fading away. Besides the usual brands like Booth’s, Gordon’s, Beefeater etc., there are now dozens of others.

A craft-brewer friend (Beaky Dargus Beer) explained it like this:

Whisk(e)y isn’t sold as a clear spirit, so has to age in a wooden barrel to pick up colour and flavour. This means time between the expenses of making it and earning back those expenses by selling it; also, aging time needs storage space, which is another expense.

(That “10 - 12 - 18 - 25 Year Old” tag you see on whiskey bottles tells you how long it’s been sitting around maturing and not making money.)

Gin however is usually sold clear,with no need for barrel aging, so no need for time and storage either. Distil it, bottle it, label it and sell it.

This hasn’t stopped at least one distiller putting it into a barrel, but that’s not the usual practice. Instead it means that Glendalough Gin can have seasonal variants using locally foraged botanicals for each time of year…

I’ve seen pink gin using red fruit (different from a “pink gin” cocktail, which is regular gin with a dash of Angostura bitters, a twist of lemon peel and a splash of ice-water), yellow gin using saffron or honey, and blue gin using Iris flowers. There’s probably a green gin too, but once I found this colour-changing one, I stopped looking. It’s getting strange out there.

One of the first “new gins” that @dduane and I sampled was Hendrick’s (with cucumber!), and once while we were on holiday in Freiburg we met Monkey 47 (with lots of things, 47 of them!) which followed us home. From never seeing it anywhere else, now we’re seeing it everywhere…

All but two (blue and colour-change) of those links come from the website of a single shop, the Celtic Whiskey Shop in Dublin.

Here’s their gin list: there are 14 pages of it, including our current favourites from the gin shelf at our local (BTW, that’s just blue glass)…

…and one very interesting variant on the theme - thumbs up to whoever thought of it!

…because here’s the good news for non-drinkers and designated drivers…

The distilled alcohol extracts all the botanical flavours and aromas, and then the alcohol is removed. Very sound idea, that.I look forward to tasting it…

if a gin shelf isn’t enough, there’s at least one gin bar in Dublin - of course it’s called The Gin Palace - and there are increasing numbers of designer tonic waters to keep the designer gins company

But that’s for some other time… :->

Hope this answers your question!

[petermorwood]

Thank you for answering my gin question! Follow up: which is the gin you mentioned that's more true to the roots of gin? I believe you said it's more woodsy, flavorful, or something like that. Thanks again.

I didn’t mention anything like that in the post (just checked to make sure...) but “Original Gin” - if there isn’t one called that, there should be! - is the Dutch / Belgian juniper-flavoured spirit called “jonge / oude jenever”. There are various brands; De Kuyper and Bols are probably the easiest to find.

It’s actually less strongly flavoured than the gins commonly found in a bar - Booths, Cork Dry, Tanqueray etc. - and when served freezer-cold as some places do, its taste is reduced even more.

Worth sampling, though, if only to give a basis for other comparisons.

[aldieb]

Top five places to think

1. driving anywhere (ideally back roads, grass, sky)

2. on top of big rock in local park

3. long walk between the river and highway

4. roof of a past apartment building at sunset (with thunderstorm rolling in if timing allows)

5. scrunched up in a closet with the door closed (don’t knock it til you try it)

[inima]

The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band - I Won't Hurt You

send me song recs and i'll respond with:

couldn’t listen all the way through | not my thing | it’s okay | kinda catchy | ok i really like this | downloading immediately | already in my library

[windandwater]

Have you ever fallen in a body of water

I have such amazing coordination and grace that not only do I never fall into creeks and other various bodies of water, I flit over them nimbly like a lithe and dainty fairy barely touching the stones if there are stones in them. I repel water; I hate getting wet and seem to supernaturally avoid it. I’ve also never fallen into two rivers at the same time and this is provably true.