Miscellaneous

How I pick wine–and I don’t know anything about wine

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Put a glass in front of me and on a good day, I might be able to tell whether it’s a chardonnay or a savignon blanc. So, given the shortcomings of my taste buds, how do I choose wine?

Geographically.

I look for parts of the world to which I feel a personal connection. Which puts Santa Barbara wines at the absolute top because I grew up in Goleta, California, just over the hilltops from the Santa Ynez wine country, and I like to pull for the home team. If I can’t find a Santa Barbara wine, I scan for Argentine and Chilean wines. Given all the time I spent in both places during my Enduring Patagonia years, I still hold them both close to my heart. Then come wines from Healdsburg, CA, home of the official winery of China’s Wings. (Cartograph Wines are fabulous! Even if I can’t claim to remember exactly what they taste like.) Beyond those, I’m likely to tilt toward a wine from New Zealand, Australia, or Spain–all places I’d like to visit someday.

And if nothing sets a geographic hook, I shop the labels–the more tacky and bizarre, the better.

Here are two wine floozies who caught my eye lately.

Head Snapper

Bizarre, slinky, and more than a little ridiculous, she leapt off the shelves at me….

But nothing like the Brayzin Hussey Blonde with her Old West bawdyhouse vibe… this woman I just had to meet.

Brayzin Hussy BlondeBrunettes need some representation!

 

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Miscellaneous

Tomato Love, spoken word performances by Melissa Fitzgerald and Dina Howard

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A celebration of tomatoes, words, and the human voice. And, of course, love.

tomatoes

Adorable, aglow, alluring, ambrosial, ample, aureate, bawdy, beautiful, bewitching, blooming, blush, bold, brazen, bulbous, buxom, captivating, cerise, cherubic, curvaceous, dazzling, delectable, delicious, desirable, divine, dreamy, earthy, elegant, enchanting, enticing, exquisite, fascinating, fetching, firm, flamboyant, flashy, flawless, fleshy, florid, flushed, full-figured, gaudy, globose, glorious, glowing, gorgeous, hale, healthy, heavy, hot, hypnotic, intoxicating, lavish, lovely, luminous, lush, lustrous, magnificent, majestic, mesmeric, mouthwatering, noble, opulent, ornate, passionate, pleasing, plush, proud, provocative, radiant, rapturous, ravishing, regal, resplendent, ripe, risqué, riveting, robust, roseate, rousing, rubenesque, rubicund, salacious, saucy, savory, scrumptious, seductive, sensuous, shapely, showy, sonsy, spellbinding, splendid, steamy, stirring, sublime, succulent, sultry, sumptuous, superb, tantalizing, tempting, voluptuous, well-formed, wonderful, yummy.

Click the audio players below and hear the words chewed over, like tasty fruit:

Melissa's photoHere, by actress, producer, and social activist Melissa Fitzgerald, perhaps best known as Carol on NBC’s award winning show The West Wing.

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Melissa stars in the fascinating series Chasing The Hill, and is a producer and driving force of the riveting documentary After Kony–Staging Hope, which tells the story of a cross-cultural collaboration between a group of American actors and 14 Ugandan teenagers (many of whom are former abducted child soldiers) who work together on a theater program in war-torn northern Uganda. Enjoy more of Melissa’s intellectual verve and sparkling personality in this brief video clip.

dina picAnd here is Tomato Love performed by Melissa’s close friend Dina Howard, courageous and award-winning creator and producer of the NPR documentary Dina’s Diary, the gripping and emotional story of Dina’s journey through breast cancer, from diagnosis through treatment. A freelance writer and radio journalist, Dina recorded Tomato Love yesterday, 7 years after diagnosis.

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MayaAll this Tomato Love inspired Dina’s daughter, Maya, to record her own performance. Which is adorable.

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And yes, they’re all home grown.

DSC_3817 (reduced)Like Maya, I didn’t want to miss out on the Tomato Love, so here’s my rendition.

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Should you find yourself inspired to record your own version of Tomato Love, do it on your smart phone and email me the file–along with a photo–and I’ll post your performance.

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Book Reviews

Worthwhile but less well-known books from my list of 400

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Last week, when I posted the list of 400 books I’ve read since I started writing Enduring Patagonia in early 2000, I promised to fish out some of the more obscure but worthwhile titles. I’m intentionally not including what I consider known classics written by the Hemingways, Bellows, Steinbecks, and Woolf’s of the world–people shouldn’t have trouble finding them on their own.

But how about Look Down in Mercy, by Walter Baxter? It doesn’t have much of a profile, but it’s possibly a great novel. It’s certainly a very good and groundbreaking one. A brutal and blunt look at 1942 ground combat in Burma and a British infantry officer’s homosexual relationship with his batman. Published in 1951, its homosexual themes probably condemned it to the neglect it has suffered ever since. (I have a signed copy, since my mother worked at Baxter’s successful London restaurant The Chanterelle in the middle 1950s and Baxter became something of a mentor and big brother to her. He was one of her most treasured friends until he passed away in 1994. Scroll down this page and find Time’s 1952 review.) It’s superbly well-written. The extreme eroticism of Baxter’s second book, The Image and the Search (which I haven’t read), about a woman’s quest to replace the love her life, killed in World War II, got him tried under England’s Obscene Publications Act of 1857. Baxter never wrote another book.

No Hurry to Get Home, by Emily “Mickey” Hahn. She’s FABULOUS. I count myself as the latest in a long line of men to have fallen at least a little bit in love with Mickey Hahn. I’ve posted about her in a few other places. She’s the inciter of China’s Wings hardest cut.

The Fever Trail by Mark Honigsbaum, a fascinating book about malaria–one of great scourges of mankind–and the epic quests of three British explorers to find and domesticate the elusive cinchona tree, the only source of quinine.

Andrew Lindblade’s Expeditions, a top-shelf climbing book about Lindblade’s climbing adventures with the late Athol Whimp. Good luck getting a copy, however–the cheapest used copy on amazon costs $465.

13 Rue Therese by Elena Mauli Shapiro. A wildly erotic book that ties love in the 21st century with a Great War love affair through a box of objects handed to an American academic in Paris. Elena keeps a good blog, too, currently titled Sophmore Novel Angst.

For high-quality, semi-obscure war stories, I suggest James Salter’s The Hunters, about pilots over Korea, Richard McKenna’s The Sand Pebbles, about a sailor in the U.S. Navy’s old Yangtze River Patrol, Sebastian Barry’s World War I classic A Long Long Way, and Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks, a hugely successful in the UK Great War story that lacks the American readership it deserves.

Also neglected in America, but not in the UK, is George MacDonald Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here. (And yes, that’s the same man who authored the classic Flashman series.) Quartered Safe is Fraser’s memoir of campaigning in Burma with the British 14th Army, and in my estimation it ranks alongside E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed as one of the two greatest memoirs of the Second World War.

Also, anything by Alan Furst, who does espionage thrillers set in 1930s and ’40s Europe.

 

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Miscellaneous

So this guy, he buys an old lamp at a garage sale…

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…and he brings it home and goes to polish it up, and out pops this genie.

And wow, she is amazing, utterly gorgeous, curvaceous, wearing nothing but a smile and a few scraps of strategically placed silk, and she pokes out a hip and says, in an sultry, seductive voice, “Master, I’ll do anything you want that you can say in three words or less.”

Well, this guy’s smart enough to keep his mouth shut because he knows this is a good thing and doesn’t want to blow it and end up with some stupid wish granted, so he sits there thinking about it for a while, pondering, and then, after a few minutes, this immense smile lights up his face…

And he holds up his fist and puts out his fingers, one-two-three, as he says, beaming,

“Paint. My. House.”

2013-07-06 12.41.01

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Iran

Iran to assign all citizens an email address

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From a Reuters report out of Dubai, “Government to assign email addresses to all citizens.”

The announcement comes from the Communications minister, who said the move would aid interaction between state authorities and the people.

I have a hard time imagining the Iranian people embracing this idea with much enthusiasm.

It seems an odd decision in the wake of President-elect Rouhani’s recent call for less state intervention in the private lives of its citizens.

The article also reports that Iranian officials have announced plans to switch Iranians onto a domestic Internet network which would be largely isolated from the World Wide Web.

That’ll go over like a lead balloon.

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