We received an email here in our sekrit underground bunker from a concerned reader.  Someone out there in the wild internets had mentioned pepper-infused Vodka, and perfidy.  Now, it may seem obvious that these things go together like two things that go really well together.  And you’d be right in thinking that.  But our concerned reader was unable to find the actual posts.

Given my staggeringly efficient search skills, locating the posts in question was in no way a problem.  In fact, if you’re interested in putting spicy and boozy in the same place, just look here:

Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow may be tax time or something. And that would suck, you know?

and

Question and answer time with Drunkle John

But what was really horrifying was that this website has not mentioned Vodka – not even once, glancingly – since four years ago yesterday.

Well, VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA!

There.  That’s better.

Things haven’t been the same since Minister Johno stopped posting.

At 2:07 this morning, #3 daughter came into the world, delivered by me.  Granted my wife did most of the work, but I didn’t drop the baby, so we’ll call that a win.

The midwife arrived about a half hour after the baby, and pronounced everything good.  Funny, through the years I’ve had a fair bit of emergency training, but baby delivery was really the last thing I expected to have to deal with.

The Maximum Leader the other day had a post about a proposed royal taxonomy of booze.  He proposed that Scotch is the king of booze, and… well, just go read it.  In reading it, I thought that it was a good idea, but the dear leader was channeling the French and it was poorly implemented.

I believe that there are in fact three warring states of booze.  The three kinds of booze do not generally get along.  Here’s how I’d break it out:

The High Test Kingdom of Liquor, The Principate of Wine, and the Republic of Beer.

The High King of Liquor is certainly Scotch.  And many of the roles the Maximum Leader suggests for other distilled spirits are appropriate.  But really, the wines would never submit to the rule of another alcohol.  The Prince of the Wines (after a recent civil war) is the House of Cabernet from California.  They displaced the French Cabernets, who are now plotting in return.  The nobility of the Principate is largely the red wines.  The awkward bourgeoisie – putting on airs, but still with red clay on their feet, is the blush and zinfandels.  The yeomanry is the white wines, though some white wines still cling to noble titles like saxons in Plantagenet England.  The serfs are the box wines. 

The republic of beer is a low place.  The vast majority of the population is low income industrial workers, the proletariat of thin American style lagers.  There is a vibrant entrepreneurial class, though, of independent craft brewers.  Some of these have become successful, and have started aping the manners of the nobility of the Liquors and Wines.  There is also a large corporate managerial class, wholly owned by the large lager magnates, but who aspire to higher quality than they actually possess.  In a curious inversion of life in America, the darker beers are the more respected and wealthy.

In the mountains between Wine and Liquor, there is a barbarous, semi-independent state inhabited by piratical and impoverished fortified wines.  The high sulfate content of the soils there leaves life very hard indeed.

It occurs to me, after reading the articles about the money mules, that you could:

1. Set up a fake paypal account, tied to one of those super-market pay-as-you-go credit cards.
2. Set up a fake email address, and sign up on Monster.com with a fake resume, etc.
3. Sign up for money mule scheme.
4. Wait for them to deposit money in the paypal account.
5. Keep the money.

Seems like it would work better than the average

1. Collect underpants
2. ???
3. Profit!

schemes.