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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. . .).

The Fairfax (VA) County police shot an unarmed optometrist to death because he was a bookie.

Okay, that’s a little misleading. Here’s a more refined version: Fairfax County police sent a SWAT team to serve a search warrant on an unarmed optometrist, for suspicion of gambling. As the team descended on the optometrist, one member’s handgun went off, killing the unarmed man.

The Agitator is all over this story, here and here

“When you draw the weapon, you always try to assess what the potential threat is going to be,” [Lt. Richard] Perez said. He said the officers in the tactical squad are “highly trained officers. Do unintentional shootings occur? Absolutely. We’re humans, and these kind of things do occur.”

Actually, they don’t occur when SWAT teams aren’t deployed for ‘routine’ warrants!

Read Charles Krauthammer’s column about his brother. It makes me wish I’d sat down and wrote about Chris Penn’s death a few days ago.

I thought about it, and brotherhood. I’m a much bigger fan of Michael Penn than I am of Sean Penn, even if Jeff Spicoli is one of the greatest film characters ever. I tried digging up an e-mail address for MP, out of some misguided notion that he’d appreciate reading condolences from an anonymous fan of his music, but that went nowhere.

And then comes Charles Krauthammer’s lovely and sad tribute to his brother Marcel.

My brother’s going to be standing at my side in a month and a half, ready to catch me if I faint during the wedding ceremony (I hope his back’s stronger than mine).

Tomorrow’s the 20th anniversary of the crash of the space shuttle Challenger. Here’s a piece on myths about the disaster.

This is all geek-talk, so feel free to go onto the next item.

I’ve updated a bunch of computer-stuff in the past week. First, I decided to double the amount of RAM in my desktop iMac to 2gb. The immediate upshot of this is that I can boot Photoshop in about 3.5 seconds. Quark, of course, still takes 15-30 seconds to boot up.

I also picked up a scanner: the Canon CanoScan LiDE 500F. It has a built in “wedge” so it takes up little space on my desktop. Thanks to the scanner, I was able to subject myself to the humiliation of that picture I posted a few days ago.

Then, I was forced to admit that the 160gb hard drive in my iMac is going to run out of space, after I integrated yet another music library into my iTunes folder. So I just picked up an external 300gb hard drive that’s awfully darn quiet: the LaCie 300GB d2. I’m in the process of moving all the music onto it, so I can let iTunes store and play music there instead of my desktop’s internal drive.

Yes, it’s embarrassing that I have more than 28,000 songs in the library. It’s more embarrassing that I have two backups of it, “just in case.”

Anyway, since Apple is moving away from the chipset employed in my computer, I imagine that I’ll have to replace the desktop computer in another 2 years or so. For the moment, though, it’s a nice setup. I promise to scan and post more embarrassing pictures, and to keep accumulating music files.

Great piece on Reason’s site by Brendan O’Neill about Osama Bin Laden’s shifting rhetoric. Here’s a piece:

It is often said that the blogging explosion was a byproduct of the 9/11 attacks, as people launched online diaries to try to make sense of those shocking events. Here’s a thought: Perhaps bin Laden himself turned to the blogosphere after 9/11, in search of theories and arguments with which he might justify his murderous assault.

[OBL’s] latest statement reveals the extent to which bin Laden borrows from Western discussions of the Middle East. This seems less a man with a clear religious or political agenda than someone who is parasitical on the fear and loathing of his enemies. Indeed, bin Laden has scolded President Bush for ignoring “U.S. opinion polls which [indicate] that the overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of the forces from Iraq.” He seems a little obsessed by opinion polls. Shortly after the Madrid train bombings in March 2004, he cited “opinion polls showing that most people in Europe want peace.” What kind of warrior for God needs to conjure up the authority of opinion polls—rather than, say, the authority of Allah—to justify himself?

Read more.

“Hmm,” pondered the Coca-Cola executive, “we know Gil Roth is a big fan of Cherry Coke. How can we change the packaging to make him feel like a complete fairy when he buys a bottle?”

I’m a cheap ethnic stereotype, but I’ve concluded that there are things you cut corners on, and things you don’t.

When I was in Vegas and wanted to take a helicopter ride to the Grand Canyon, I decided to avoid the signs out on the strip that read, “Discount Helicopter Tours.”

As I wrote a few years ago, it’s not smart to go cheap when buying a carbon monoxide detector.

Never complain about shoes you bought at Payless.

And never trust an experimental Chinese fusion reactor built on the cheap:

Experiments with the advanced new device will start in July or August. If the experiments prove successful, China will become the first country in the world to build a full superconducting experimental Tokamak fusion device, nicknamed “artificial sun”, experts said.

The project, dubbed EAST (experimental advanced superconducting Tokamak), is being undertaken by the Hefei-based Institute of Plasma Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It will require a total investment of nearly 300 million yuan (37 million U.S. dollars), only one fifteenth to one twentieth the cost of similar devices being developed in the other parts of the world.