Day: January 28, 2006

In my ongoing mission to find a good gin, I’ve had some ups and downs.

Up? Why, Tanqueray No. 10, which was the first premium brand of gin I tried out. It taught me that there is a difference betwen the cheap(ish) stuff and the higher price stuff.

Down? Well, maybe I got a bad bottle, but Hendricks was a massive disappointment. It taught me that, even though you have a high price (around $27 for a 750 ml bottle), you might taste like crap.

So I had no great expectations when I tried the humorously named Wet by Beefeater this week (note: “this week” does not necessarily mean that I go through a bottle of this stuff every week). I bought it on a whim, while Amy was picking up some Rieslings at the Wine Library.

It was a mid-price point brand ($18 for 750ml), and had classier packaging than the regular brand. And that was enough to sway me. I’m easy.

So how does it stack up? It’s awfully darn good in my standard gin & tonic combo. It has a really interesting “high note” that I couldn’t place. I checked out the label and realized that it’s infused with pear. Amy liked it in the martini I made for her, so we’re willing to Nick-and-Nora it up with a gin called Wet by Beefeater for a while.

If you come by for the Superbowl next week, I promise to make one of my un-American drinks for you. It’ll go well with Amy’s Frito-pie.

Ass-bleaching. Enjoy, unless you object to graphic content (no pix, just text), in which case you shouldn’t follow that link.

I attended the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD from 1993-1995. At the end of that period, I was awarded a Master of Arts, Liberal Arts degree (we nicknamed it the evil Spanish woman degree, or M.A.L.A.).

During four different job interviews (between 1995 and 1997), the person on the other side of the desk would look at my résumé, get a furrowed brow, and ask, “Why did you get a liberal arts graduate degree?”

There were a couple of responses to this, none of them particularly useful (nor indeed adequate). The best I could come up with was, “It taught me how to learn.”

I used that phrase when I had to give a speech at my undergrad alma mater, Hampshire College, in 2002. I don’t think the kids got what I was saying, but I tried.

This morning, I was reading an interview in The Comics Journal with Eddie Campbell, one of our age’s finest cartoonists (excerpts here). His 4-page Little Italy comic strip (collected in Three Piece Suit) is my all-time favorite. Here’s a snippet from the interview:

I think on the education front, the world focuses too much on the idea of education as a means to a job. Imagine learning all the great wisdom of the world so that you can get a job. What an absurdity. We should be learning all the great wisdom of the world in order to become wise.

All of which is to say, nothing at St. John’s explicitly prepared me to be the editor of a pharmaceutical contract services business-to-business magazine, but I wouldn’t trade those two years for anything (now, the four years at Hampshire, on the other hand. . .).