My Mother's Advice

Sounds like your mom is right on the money, with almost every one of those bon mots.

So ... if one may ask, what prompted the new piece of advice? Not that it contradicts any of its predecessors (which speak to teenagers and boyfriends), but the spirit is different.

... this business about making cookies and pies ... this isn't some sort of Mayberry-esque courtship scheme, is it? Put them out on the windowsill and see what men-folk amble by?

Well, fun is fun, but choose your alliances more carfully than you choose your bowling partners. My mum's advice on love-life was "a stiff one has no conscience." Mum looked a bit distraught when at 13, I brought home a nice Irish girl of 14 with 36D's! Be a goodhousekeeper; every time you get divorced, keep the house. Find a rich old guy with one foot in the grave, and the other one on a banana peel. Guys: find a girl who's dad owns a brewery, and with a flat forehead so you can park your beer in bed. Don't get your true love's name tattooed on your bum.

spent two days at the ancestral manse, filled all the Tupperware with baked goods, and left me to either distribute their largesse or apply it to my thighs. Some people will get packages of long-distance cookies. Too bad I don't have the King of Prussia's address.

I've been cookin' mostly cajun and Chinese lately. The cajun is mostly red beans and rice with okra sausage and shrimp and hot pepper sauce. But to go with the cajun, I bake a lot of corn bread, to which I add more eggs and about a cup of sugar. Fresh, hot corn bread with butter and molasses, mmmmmmmmmm. If I keep eatin' like this, I'm going to have to get a belt to hold up my red suspenders. I got TWO kinds of bitters, which are good for adding a drop or two to whiskey, and to cajun food, I like the Angostura bitters better in my bourbon, and the Peychaud's is better for cooking and mixing Sazerac's. I don't know that corn bread and molasses isn't an acquired taste.
"Sazerac"

my ol da said to me, he said

son, women will use their looks to try to get you to do things for them. watch out for that.

i just nodded. i was like 10, i thought he'd suddenly gone insane.

That's what it was! I find the Angostura a bit Worcestershirey for mixing with bourbon. Right now I've got Jack Daniel's, Wild Turkey that I'm wary of drinking because my friend Chris backwashed in it after vomiting, and Maker's Mark.

Ben, I'll give those cookies a good home.

Staniel, since you like exotic experiments, and the Wostershire reminded me, there's a drink with beef bullion and bourbon called a Bullshot. A cookie thing that I remember from Oregon; once I was in a food co-op, and someone gave me a truckload of Archway Oatmeal Cookies, the apple, and the raspberry ones were good, they were OK for store-bought cookies. It was a lot of cookies. I ate a lot of them and the co-op sold them for 25 cents a dozen!

is still being produced in several European countries, including Great Britain much to my surprise, with the same hallucinogenic ingredients. There are strong controls on bringing it across borders and oceans. A very similar duplicate, called "Absint" I believe, or something very much like that, is now being produced. Apparently the creator calculated the precise ingredients down to a chemical level to create a beverage as close to real absinthe as he would be allowed to sell in the United States. Finding it is apparently an adventure in and of itself.

I like absinthe, and it's a legend, too. Wormwood! But I could never figure out why mom's always tell you to wear clean underwear (I always do, or wear none) because if I had and accident like mom is always warning about so that I should wear clean underwear, my underwear probably wouldn't be clean AFTER the accident, so advice to carry a spare set, like having dry socks, might be better advice. My sister told me that she can tell if she had a good time on a date by throwing her underwear at the ceiling.

i think most of the stuff in europe is fake. original stuff is speculated to have contained 33mg/kg thujone. hill's (the british stuff) has hardly any and i've heard it tastes bad. sebor (czech) tastes good but apparently the taste is not like the real stuff.

absinth.com sells brands that claim to have 30-40mg/kg thujone, and one they make themselves which says it has 100mg/kg. they're all very expensive. possibly a hoax, too, since the US and EU have acceptable limits of toxic stuff you can have in your products and thujone has a very low allowance. i think that any legit stuff would be illegal and any of the legal stuff would require drinking so much alcohol that you'd pass out or get sick before anything else. and don't rule out the possibility that the whole has-effects-other-than-those-of-alcohol thing could just be a big dumb rumor.

"abinsthe: history in a bottle" is a good book, mostly for the short bios on all the famous absinthe drinkers, most of whom met their ends by shooting themselves or exploding.

i had quite a bit of it in the czech republic... i think it might have been Hill's. The only unusual effects i noticed were acute intoxication and slight uneasiness about drinking something that looked exactly like mouthwash. i certainly didn't see any flowers with teeth or ships full of ghost sailors or start writing sonnets or anything. oh well. more testing is probably needed.

You can't legally sell real Absinthe anywhere in Europe. The stuff's poisonous! However, in most places east and south of Berlin someone will know someone who knows someone and they'll get you a bottle if they think you really mean it about being suicidal. The only thing you should put in whisky (or whiskey) is more whisk(e)y. Put what you like in Bourbon though - it's rank anyway. And remember, don't eat the Worm. It's full of mescaline, which is bad for you!

Oh yeah, and on the partner thing, it's a good plan to decide what you're looking for and go for it rather than let yourself be scooped up by some maniac. Avoid prudes. They always look embarrassed in lace. (hint for ladies - blokes don't care if you look like an underwear model or not so long as you look like you want to shag, so none of this "oh my legs are too short/pink/thin/dimensionally enhanced for that" crap).

Perhaps Annna could follow the example of the black widow and the mantis; mate, and then devour your partner. But if you have to get divorced, be sure to get abalone.

Yez have all gone very quiet. Was it something I said?

Everyone is full of cookies and sleeping it off. I had to laff, when I read the current edition of The Onion, they had a new Proctor&Gamble product listed,"Menstru-Alert"