Quote of the Day

Darth Vadar with a fifth of Jack

May the fifth be with you. - Me on realizing 

I had put up two Quote of the Day posts earlier today, so I thought I could plead drunkenness on account of having drunk a fifth of whiskey, which would make me exceedingly drunk. I wasn't that drunk, just a little overwhelmed by all I am trying to get done, so the reference to the fifth was just a dog whistle for having an alcoholic drink. Tweet tweet! Plus we just had May the fourth be with you yesterday, so May the fifth be with you. i.e. may you have a fifth of whiskey by your side. I prefer whiskey over other spirits, mostly because it's American. Most all other spirits originated in other places, but in America we make whiskey.

I don't think there is much difference in the spirits you buy at the liquor store. I never noticed any particular flavor, well, except for gin. Gin has a distinctive taste, bayberries my mother said. Whatever bayberries are. I suppose if you put several different liquors in front of me I could tell you they taste, no, smell, different. Scotch is different as well. Supposedly it has a smokey taste (smell?), but I don't remember the last time I had a Scotch. Now I avoid it because it's expensive and it offends me miserly sensibilities to pay more than $20 for a bottle of hooch. Maybe in another five years my taste will improve and I will be able to appreciate $35 liquors, but I doubt it. In five years my sense of taste / smell will likely have deteriorated to the point that I could save money by buying the stuff off the bottom shelf and saving a bundle of money. Yeah, right, $10 a month.

Now that I have been thinking about this for a bit, I realize that Tequila also has a distinct smell / taste. Rum is pretty innocuous, and vodka is pert near invisible.

 Liquors get their essential character from the materials they are made from. Whiskey comes from corn or grain, Vodka comes from potatoes, Rum comes from Sugar. Gin, I think also comes from potatoes, but the potatoes were rotten, so they threw in some of them bayberry leaves to cover the smell. Potatoes have improved since then, but tradition hangs on. And who knows? with all the doom and disaster being forecast, there's a chance that rotten potatoes will make a comeback and we may all hope we have enough bayberries to cover the smell.

State Line Liquor

Some people are serious alcoholics, drinking a fifth of liquor a day. I wonder what percentage of the sales at liquor stores go to alcoholics. One alcoholic drinking a fifth a day would equal 30 people drinking a fifth a month, so maybe half? Huh. Now those liquor stores on the border with Nevada start to make sense.

Nevada Liquor Stores

Asking Google Maps for liquor stores turned up a grocery store on the Oregon border and not much else. Regular Google turned up several others and the above map. Since most of these places don't have websites, I surmise that Google looked for references that mentioned the address and then compiled that into a list to display using Google Maps. Okay, I just tried to reproduce my original search for liquor stores using Google Maps and failed. The two are talking to each other and now Google Maps understands more about liquor stores. So I resorted to searching for the grocery store that turned up earlier and that's what you get with the link.

Now that I've gone looking for a picture [top] I realize the phrase might not be original with me. That's okay, it was new to me and that's what counts.