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Esse Quam Videre

by boegiboe on May 10, 2012

I was born in North Carolina, and most of my family still live there. Both brothers, my dad, and almost all of my mother’s remaining sisters and brothers and their families. Except for four years of my childhood spent in California, I was raised in the Foothills. To the extent I realized I was different, I knew I wasn’t welcome.

My understanding of my homo nature started when I was very young. I remember exchanging valentines in second grade and being particularly happy about one I got from a particular boy, and I was aware enough to be ashamed of it but to also hope that he felt the same way. Sex wasn’t involved; this is probably part of the reason that many gay people find the term “homoSEXual” to be uncomfortable. The stress is in the wrong place.

Anyway, I grew up confused, but I fortunately fell in with a wonderful group of friends in high school, some of whom realized about me what I didn’t know. They variously helped and hindered me in my self-discovery, but all in all, their forcing me to confront the possibilities allowed me to come out at age 20. I do think I could never have come out to myself while actually IN North Carolina, at my undergrad school of N.C. State in Raleigh–I was in France at the time. I had always taken the state motto “To be rather than to seem” very seriously; I was, in effect, a North Carolina patriot. But to find I had been “seeming” for so long, and that I would need to continue to do so because of North Carolina’s occasionally enforced laws against unnatural acts, struck hard at the core of me.

I had a rough time adjusting, but also great old friends, and some great new ones: You get bonus friends when you come out as gay. I hadn’t known that! I had a wonderful first boyfriend. I had wild times, and a couple of really insane relationships. I even had a straight boyfriend (his word) for a while; he ended up coming out years later, but I was just too skinny for him. But he ended up coming out somewhere other than North Carolina. After I graduated, I moved away, too. The first boyfriend had moved away before me (though he was kind enough a couple years later to introduce me to Jason).

The vote in N.C. yesterday falls in line with the state motto. No longer content to seem vaguely unwelcoming, menacing, a majority of North Carolinians decided to make it clear. The last Southern state to put it in their Constitution, that which defines it, North Carolina now is officially anti-gay.

Bravo.

Now, Jason and I will have to be careful about carrying documentation of our equal parentage of Alice. “But no, that’s not what the change means” you might say. How much do we leave to the real understanding of the law held by the particular hospital admittance officer or police officer or what-have-you? “We voted that you are not married, so X document doesn’t mean anything here.” Think I’m paranoid? I was trained to be this way. By North Carolina.

Now my nephew will eventually–many years from now, probably–have to have it explained to him that his cousin’s parents aren’t married when they come to visit. (If the Maryland referendum goes the same way, maybe it won’t matter who’s visiting whom.) I hope he’s outraged. I hope for the sake of the whole country that he’s outraged. All I can feel is unwelcome.

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May Double Dip

by boegiboe on May 8, 2012

About a month ago, Jason and I watched Total Recall together as part of my effort to get him educated on sci-fi movies. He expected a need to be well-oiled, so I made up two cocktails for us. As it turned out, they were identical in appearance, though very different in flavor. Jason thought they were worth posting here, and since it was hard to choose between them, I named them Thing One and Thing Two, and so, this month is a two-fer:

Thing One

  • 1/2 oz Cuarenta-y-Tres (43) vanilla Liqueur
  • 1/2 oz Islay scotch
  • 1 oz brandy (could be cognac)
  • 2 oz vodka

Thing Two

  • 1 oz limoncello
  • 1 oz vodka
  • 2 oz rhum barbancourt (or any dark rum would work)

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone at LeagueFest later this month. I feel like I’m meeting a bunch of rock stars! Except we’re all geeks. Don’t know if that’s better or worse…

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Happy Easter!

by boegiboe on April 6, 2012

As Alice’s day-care teachers said yesterday, March came in like a lamb here in Maryland, and has left like a lion. Jason’s planted basil twice so far, and it’s frozen to death both times in unseasonable frosts. I never even saw the second planting, as it frosted that very night with predictions only down around 45 or so.

Alice is loving spring this year, pointing out flowers and the bright moon in the afternoon sky. She’s a full, real person in there (as I’ve always known), and now it’s increasingly fun to talk to that little person, rather than mainly try to guide her through the day. We all three danced to Herb Alpert tonight, and I took the opportunity to start teaching her to recognize different instruments by ear. She picked it up pretty quick.

So, I’m due to post a cocktail, and I wanted something suitably spring-y. Fortunately, an intern at the company that sells Pama liqueur found my Aztec martini and decided to send me a comp bottle of Pama. The big size.

I have already gotten free stuff for blogging. I love this game! Anyway, that’s the disclaimer for why I was inspired to make up a cocktail using Pama. However, even if you’re disgusted by how easy it was to buy my time (Other alcohol manufacturers, please note how easy it was to buy my time) I will say that you can probably substitute regular pomegranate juice for the Pama and still get something nice. You can try cranberry juice, I guess, but I don’t like that nearly as much as pomegranate.

So, yeah, Pama was surprisingly yummy. I expected a syrupy schnapps-like liqueur colored deep red and flavored like berries, kinda. What I got, though, was something just a bit sweeter than pomegranate juice, but with all the tartness and tannins of the real thing. The makers of Pama have a whole bunch of pre-invented cocktails, made up by a professional mixologist, so I have no delusions about what they thought they’d get bringing the drink to my attention. But I took it as a challenge. I wanted to make something their pro hadn’t thought of.

So, to celebrate spring’s arrival, here is the Crescendo:

The Crescendo

  • 2 oz vanilla vodka
  • 1 oz Pama liqueur
  • 1/2 oz Southern Comfort

Shake vigorously with ice and strain into a martini glass. A lime twist is a nice complement.

The name is for the Crescent City whence Southern Comfort flowed first in the late 1800′s. I tried to think of names that combine the three flavors of vanilla, pomegranate and SoCo, but everything remotely related to pomegranate is already taken (many by this Pama-hired dude who made up all these mods to existing cocktails and added Pama). Anyway, the drink:

Shaking vigorously gives a nice foamy look reminiscent of those more old-fashioned cocktails that include egg white, but you don’t have to deal with the messy shaker, or the salmonella. I used Absolut Vanilla for the vodka, but I’m sure others would work well. I tried subbing triple sec for the SoCo, and it just didn’t work as well; even Jason, who hates Southern Comfort, preferred (and actually liked) the SoCo version best.

So, sorry for the wait this time. At least it’s just in time for Easter, and it will pair very nicely with the chocolate and jelly beans you have to eat to, uh, make sure your kids don’t get cavities.

Cheers!

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New Cocktail for March

by boegiboe on March 4, 2012

For you libertarians out there (and here) watching the Koch v Cato business unfold, here’s some comfort:

When the world is falling down around you,
And everything fills you with dread,
Just think of dear old Louis the Sixteenth
and try not to lose your head.

The Louis the XVIth

  • 2 or 3 oz bourbon whiskey
  • 1 oz St-Germain liqueur
  • ice

Shake with ice and serve up, no garnish.

Named for the most famous French Bourbon king, the Louis-the-XVIth combines the rich flavors of your favorite bourbon whiskey (I like Maker’s Mark for mixing) with the delicate flavors of a great French liqueur. When I first tasted St-Germain, it was offered as a precious treat by Jason’s Aunt Helen. It reminded us of the ice wines we tasted near Niagara Falls after our wedding in 2003, so I bought Jason a bottle for our next anniversary. (It’s pretty typical for us that each buys the other something the former will like, too; almost unavoidable, since we share so many of the same tastes.)

Now, my recipe here is fair game for this feature since I did make it up without any prior knowledge of St-Germain cocktails, but I have come to find that the “Paris Manhattan” described at the St-Germain web site is very similar. However, I still find the Louis-the-XVIth to be superior in that you can still taste all the complex flavors of the two constituents without the muddling effects of vermouth. This is the same reason I prefer not to have a distracting garnish.

Finally, I promise if this feature lasts another year, I will make up something Irish-themed for your St. Paddy’s Day parties next March.

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February Drink of the Month

by boegiboe on February 4, 2012

When I attended the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Lyon, France, in the 1994-95 school year, I had a Tunisian roommate named Samir. We got along pretty well–despite being an observant Muslim, he forgave me the incident when, as a result of my friends’ “Get Scott Drunk Party,” I made the room uninhabitable to him for a day. His cousin, Hatem, was a student of the Koran as well as engineering, and he visited us often. They liked to chat about Islam and the Koran with me, an American who knew nothing more than it was written by a guy named Mohammed. At first, they were very defensive, but once they figured out I had no preconceptions, it was fun. It helped that I was fascinated by Arabic, and Samir taught me the alphabet and a few words and phrases. It turns out the Arabic greeting Samir taught me–”As-sliama”–is specific to Tunisia. (Sorry if I mistransliterated, but I can’t find the right way online.)

After a trip back to Tunisia, Samir shared with me some special pastries made by his grandmother. They were out of this world…well, out of my world, anyway. I’d never had so much as halvah, so I’d never experienced anything like these tiny cakes that were bone dry, delicate and crumbly, but permeated with flavor. Sesame was at the fore, of course, but there was pistachio, date, rose, clove, cinnamon, and I’m sure more that I just can’t remember. It was a wonderful gift for him to share his family’s traditions with me.

When the uprisings occurred in Tunisia in 2010, I tried to use the Internet to find Samir, but to no avail; his family name was just too common. I found someone with the exact same name as his cousin, and I wrote him, hoping it might be the same one. I wished them well, explaining why I was writing to someone who was probably a complete stranger (I just couldn’t imagine how Hatem could have aged into the person in the picture I found), and wishing this Hatem well in his new Tunisia.

So, a year ago, Tunisia had its first freely elected president ever, and a wave of Arab protests sparked by the Tunisian uprising would become known as the Arab Spring. You may think me callous to feel celebratory when the Bahraini rebellion was so mercilessly crushed and the Syrian rebellion escalates to full civil war. I tend to think we should celebrate freedom when and where we can, and so my February drink of the month is called the Arab Spring. If you don’t like it, call it some other damn thing.

The Arab Spring

  • 1 oz rose syrup
  • seltzer
  • ice
  • cinnamon stick

Pour the rose syrup over the ice in a rocks glass, fill with seltzer, and stir and garnish with the cinnamon stick. Don’t ditch the cinnamon. I found rose syrup in an Arab foods store, which you may or may not have in your area. If you find rose water instead (I couldn’t find any), that might be more authentic, so go for it and tell me how it tastes!

Note that this is our first non-alcoholic “cocktail” of the month, out of respect for the fellows–Samir and Hatem–who connected me, however tenuously, with Tunisia. It’s sooooo worth it–it is absolutely delicious. Plus, it’s a lovely pink-to-red color if you use rose syrup, which makes it perfect for Valentine’s Day! Double plus, any of our Leaguers who don’t drink can enjoy it with reckless abandon.

For those who couldn’t care less about sipping something non-alcoholic, I understand. So, I’ve tried some variations. You can add a splash of cinnamon schnapps, and that works very well. You can add a shot of vodka before filling with seltzer, and that also works, and of course combining that with the schnapps is good, too. I thought I was brilliant for the idea of replacing the seltzer with champagne, but this fails, as the fruity flavors of the champagne completely cover the rose flavor. Finally, and I haven’t tried this yet, but I know it would work, you can steep homegrown (or organic) rose petals in vodka for a week or so and use that plus red food coloring in place of the rose syrup.

Sorry if it’s too exotic to get all the ingredients, but if you can find them, it’s totally worth trying. Happy Valentine’s Day, and happy anniversary of the beginning of the end of American Imperialism!

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Happy New Year Cocktail

by boegiboe on January 4, 2012

When I started this feature, I looked forward to this being the first 2012 addition:

The Aztec Martini

  • 1 part tequila (gold preferred)
  • 1 part creme de cacao
  • 1 part chile pepper infused vodka (Absolut Peppar works)

Shake ingredients with ice and serve.

It’s three classic flavors from our neighbors down south, back five hundred years. The chile was the Aztec’s chil (their roasted pepper was the chil potl), and they thought it an excellent adjunct to their most treasured chocolatl. I don’t know the history of tequila as well, but since I’ve listed it two months’ running, I guess I’d better learn. I do think tequila is woefully underappreciated as a mixer, something I learned when I first had a real Long Island Iced Tea.

The Aztec has been a favorite party drink in our house since I first made it in 2006, and I almost destroyed my boss with it this New Year, despite my being nowhere near him.

Though not required, I like to garnish with cacao nibs. They float on top and sneak into every other sip. This drink is a great night-starter because of the caffeine-sugar-alcohol mix (so long, Four Loko), and even if you don’t have the ingredients in your own home, it’s easy to remember for the next time you’re in a bar and looking for something new.

Cheers!

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Gin is a Sometime Drink

by boegiboe on December 4, 2011

I enjoy what is often thought of as the classic gin martini. I don’t want a third of the drink to be vermouth, but neither do I wave the bottle of vermouth over the shaker à la Churchill. In the end, though, I drink gin often, and it is important to me to be not a liquor glutton, but a gourmet. Thus we come to the December cocktail of the month: The Three Fathers

  • 1/2 oz Frangelico
  • 1 oz tequila
  • 2 oz akvavit

Mix the ingredients in a rocks glass. Add rocks. (I like simple recipes.)

So, that’s it. The hardest part about this cocktail was the name. I had to do some research to come up with a name that would stick in my memory. Akvavit is a Scandinavian “water of life” (cf French eau de vie, Irish uisce beatha [whisky], Fremen worm puke, &c). I used Aalborg Akvavit for this recipe, which I learned began with 3 aquavit fathers, and the akvavit definitely makes this drink work. Besides that, the Frangelico, of course, pours out of the head of a little glass friar, sort of like Mrs. Butterworth. I can squeeze the tequila in under the name of Tres Generaciónes.

Note that there is a lot of room for playing around here if we are willing to stray from the patriarchy, so to speak. I tried substituting amaretto for Frangelico, and the result was nice, but not as nice as with Frangelico (which I actually usually hate in most drinks). The tequila I used was an inexpensive silver, but one could use gold just as well (the nut liqueur colors the drink anyway, if you care about presentation). If you are in a part of the world that affords you a choice of akvavits, I can’t speak for what this would do to the drink. The caraway flavor mixing with the earthy hazelnut and agave flavors is what is so nice about the Three Fathers, but there may be any number of variations that come out nice as well. I’m a pluralista on such matters. Just let us know if you find a nice twist.

Altogether we have three venerable tonics, mixed judiciously, which give us a lovely holiday cocktail. I’ll see you all around New Year’s if not before. Cheers!

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Cocktail of the Month

by boegiboe on November 10, 2011

I have few valuable social skills, but I’m decent at concocting new, well, concoctions. As a new Slow Tuesday Night feature, each month I’ll post an original drink recipe of mine. I start the feature off this month with a recipe I made just yesterday, the Opium Martini.

  • 3 oz vodka
  • 1 oz Canton Ginger Liqueur
  • scotch

The vodka should have a clean taste, and the scotch should be a smoky one; I like Dewar’s for other things, but I don’t think it’d work here. Wash a cold martini glass with scotch, leaving a few drops at the bottom. Shake the vodka and liqueur vigorously with ice and pour into the glass. Garnish as you please; a lime twist wouldn’t be out of place, but I like it clean and unspoilt.

In the future, I’ll aim at posting the monthly recipe in the first few days of the month.

Cheers!

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Sound and Vision

by boegiboe on October 19, 2011

Our daughter, Alice, had her first school field trip this past Friday. As parents we were asked to get the kids excited for the trip to a nearby petting farm by talking about farm animals and the sounds they make. That kind of preparation will be good for her eventually, I guess, but she’s only recently turned two and the ways that thoughts and memories interact for her are inchoate and mysterious, not something I feel capable of guiding over several days. Still, I complied; part of the reason Alice is in day care is because these people are professional educators, so I try to remind myself they often may know more about what is going on in Alice’s blossoming mind than I do.

The school bus ride was along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. For those who haven’t driven that corridor, its lush canopy of trees is always a pleasant respite from the metropolitan concrete jungle we usually travel and work in around here. As we watched the trees go by, I asked Alice to tell me what colors she saw. I demonstrated by pointing out some yellow leaves, and she quickly reciprocated with “orange”! Then came green, which though it was something of a gimme, was unquestionably correct, since the autumn change is only just starting in our area. Then I was surprised by “Black!” shouted firmly and delightedly, but there it was—a tree that had died in some way that turned its leaves all a crisp, charcoal black. The rush of color was unyielding, and we’d seen everything in the Crayola 8-pack palette but blue by the time we left the parkway.

We arrived at the petting farm just in time to have to run for shelter as a huge thunderstorm hit. Lightning, wind, and rain kept us away from the animals for half an hour, but we got off lucky compared to the Virginians who received the first blows from this round of storms. Alice has always considered rain to be a good thing. She loves to get wet, and I suspect that inside the black box of her mind, water coming down from the sky, all over the place, might be just about the best thing imaginable.

Next hour or so saw us slogging through a muddy, swampy field to look at and pet live farm animals for Alice’s first time. She knew that cows said “moo” but before this had no idea how big they were. Reality must come screaming at her wildly at times of discovery like this. She always loves to pet the furry patches on the cows in her books, but was completely unable to bring herself to touch any of the cows. She did better with the Shetland pony that was her size. The piglets were surrounded by so much mud and water that the pull of puddle-jumping was stronger than their oinking allure. We petted guinea pigs (they say “oink,” too, by the way, just at a much higher pitch), chicks and ducklings, and rabbits.

There was a sheep a bit taller than Alice who calmly watched us approach, and after she and Alice checked one another out, I asked the requisite “What does a sheep say?” “Baa-baa,” was the dutiful and comfortable reply from Alice. This time, though, it was followed shortly by the sheep demonstrating how badly we had butchered its native tongue by offering a commanding “Baa!” of its own. This sound froze Alice. She was visibly disturbed—not merely frightened, but troubled somehow by the power of the animal in front of her. It struck me how much courage it must take for Alice to approach something so much larger than herself, something so alien (sheep have creepy eyes, don’t they?) despite there being cute, homogeneously woolly versions of them in her books. She finally did approach a bit, and from there fell upon the baby goats. She loved the goats; she almost immediately gave one a sweet, gentle hug. At times like these I can’t help but fall more in love with this brave and loving person.

From there we took a gander at the geese, dallied with the ducks, and chased the chickens. We had our lunch, and as we finished that up, the rain began again, giving us enough warning to get under cover without getting too wet. Under the roof the farm’s minstrel was singing children’s songs to his guitar’s accompaniment. Alice launched herself into a whirling dance with the other children, all of them bigger and older than she. As the rain picked up, more kids joined the fray. I was torn between leaving her unfettered and protecting her from the other kids, and in those situations I generally try to restrain my helicopter self. The kids kept coming, and they got rowdier and rowdier, egged on by the guitar-playing ringmaster, and eventually I took a step back and realized—my daughter is in her very first mosh pit. She did well against the older kids, making it through 5 songs before I finally felt I had to remove her. Ending such a great day with a mashed finger would’ve been a tragedy.

Alice protested her removal from the kinder-bacchanalia, but soon we were at another entry to the shelter where the heavy rain, driven by the wind, was encroaching on the dry interior. Alice stood at the front edge of the rain’s advance jumping and shrieking ecstatically. I just let her go at it; after the falls into the mud and the trekking through streams of water, she really couldn’t be made more dirty by the rain. The emotion of the moment was strong; in the face of this storm, this powerful force of nature, which was so much bigger than the cows that had worried her, Alice wanted to throw herself into the whipping wind and rain. She was overcome with glee at the thought of embracing something that clearly terrified even some of the adults in our midst. To perceive with a mind so sharply aware, so intensely focused as to see the color on every leaf that passed through her vision, she was more, not less, in love with the storm than the rest of us who were either afraid of its lightning or even just annoyed by its wet. Those of us who perceive the world so dimly that little of its detail enters our consciousness. Even if it’s a good adaptation for living and breeding successfully in the wild, the blindness of the adult senses to so much of our reality is still a loss we should recognize. Thank goodness we have children to remind us, and to perceive things as we cannot.

Laughing at the Storm

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The End of Gerrymandering

by boegiboe on October 17, 2011

So, gerrymandering keeps popping up as a problem in politics this year-after-the-census. It was a good idea for a little while (at least) to help get minority representation in Congress. That is probably the only legitimate reason to keep the practice now, and even if the current crop of gerrymanders doesn’t move toward that goal, maybe there will need to be some help in that direction in 2020.

All that aside, what interests me here is: What would be a totally fair, nonpartisan process for establishing congressional districts? Should we grid the entire nation into squares of a certain not-too-big/not-too-small size, and the squares must be assigned so that they are contiguous? What’s the right grid resolution?

Should each district be required to have an area centroid that has a direct, unbroken path to every point in the district? This one is geometrically appealing, but could get very, very difficult to execute.

For any given, small enough area, political party probably closely pairs with another variable: race, income, property value, age, students vs non-students, etc. Our ability to analyze census data now would look like telepathy to the authors of the Constitution. Had they known what solidity could be guaranteed in voting patterns with our technology, would they have chosen a different method of apportionment?

I’m curious here: I’ve always thought “There MUST be a better way to determine district borders.” Yet, it’s hard to think of one. Anyone got any ideas?

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