Happy Flag Day and Happy 77th Birthday to Donald J. Trump, and let’s hope there aren’t too many more of these.
When I was freelancing a few years ago I became chummy with another freelancer who was originally from the Caribbean. A happier person I’ve never met. When birthday boy Donald J. Trump fired off the tweet about covfefe around Memorial Day, 2017, neither of us could get enough, so when we’d run into each other instead of saying, “Hey” or “Hello” we would say, “Covfefe!”
Right around now, but six years ago, he invited me to his house for a cookout, and there a couple of my coworkers and I met his family and friends and ate way more food than was really necessary, but it was so amazing. He also, for me, developed the Covfefe Cocktail. He and his family don’t drink themselves, but he knew I was a lush, and he thought I might like this. It’s not bad, really, but…well, you’ll see.
Brew some coffee and leave it to chill in the fridge until ready to serve. I would use decaf, and I almost never advise using decaf.
In a big glass, like a large Tom Collins or hurricane glass, add a little dark rum, a little of the cold (but don’t add ice) coffee, and alternate this about three times. You don’t want to stir.
At the very end, spoon on whipped cream. Serve with straws.
It does the trick. It’ll get you get you drunk, alright, but if you use fully caffeinated coffee you’ll have that unpleasant sensation where you’re desperate to just close your eyes but the caffeine is racing through your body so sleep becomes impossible. But this is what makes it the Covfefe. It’s 3:30 am, you can’t sleep, you’re barely coherent, coffee and alcohol are both diuretics, so you’re on your toilet and decide to tweet from your unsecured smartphone about Hillary Clinton’s involvement in any number of things, real or imagined.
Genius, really.
How big of a glass would you need to put in enough rum to pass out and forget that Trump existed?
Just asking for a “friend.”
You can do the Cousin Mattie Magic Drinking Trick. In Europe they often serve table wine out of common drinking glasses. So they put the bottle or carafe down and you pour yourself.
In the Crawley household, I have a whole set of enormous (they’re actually kind of vulgar) wine glasses, and another set of crystal wine glasses that must be at least a century old, and a set of water glasses that each hold 16 oz. of liquid. When we have people over we get them drunk out of the wine glasses, but when it’s just us I bring out the water glasses and I will say, “What? This is only my second glass.” Meanwhile the wine bottle is empty…
So use something like that.
You know what else works? Drinking wine from those tiny glasses like the Italians do. Which leads to rationalizations like “What’s the harm in having another?” and “They are so tiny, why bother counting?”…one large damigiana di vino del Nonno (he made excellent wine) later and we’re all spewing purple vomit on the floors and walls… Having an Italian boyfriend was fun while it lasted.
I have actually slept nude in the same bed with an Italian man but…it’s a long story. But anyway, it was not romantic, so I can’t really say I’ve had sexy times with a paisan. God how I wish I had, in my prime.
@MatthewCrawley I’m sorry to say that you have definitely missed out 🍆. Some of my most memorable romps have been with… I won’t bore you with the details.
I know (95%) exactly what I’m missing out on, because a lot of times when we were in Italy, I’d say, “If I’m reading this bus schedule right, it seems like there’s frequent service to [a string of beach towns] so let’s spend the day there.” BH doesn’t like going to the beach, because not only is he Black and doesn’t need to get any darker, he sunburns very easily. I have no idea how this works. But I like to go, and in Italy you can rent everything you need, beach chairs, towels, even swimsuits, which you would think would be kind of gross, but people do it. You access the beaches through a hotel or a restaurant, so a server will come by and supply you with aperitivi, and snacks, and there, in their Speedo- and bikini-clad glory, will be the locals, or the near-locals.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Booze and coffee are a wonderful match made on the other side of heaven.
Have you ever seen the movie Far From Heaven?
BH and I actually paid good American currency and saw it in a theater. When we left I said to him, “Oh, God, I would give anything to live in that era.”
“Mattie! What are you saying? The way the gay character and the Black character—”
“I don’t give a shit. Everyone looked fabulous, that amazing house probably cost the husband one year’s salary, not 20 year’s, like nowadays. You could vote Republican and hold your head high and not be voting for loons like—”
“Mattie.”
I’m digging your interpretation of Covfefe. I being less mature and more nerdy than you found this to be my favorite Covfefe meme:
I don’t know who those two cartoon characters are, but again, the creator of the Covfefe Cocktail came from a country, or at least a region, where rum and coffee are huge exports. That’s what I love about New York. Imagine New York without immigrants. I have no idea what the Lenape (the original settlers) used to eat 400 years ago, but I kind of know what the Dutch would have, and then the English, and, thanks, but I’ll stick to 21st-century cuisine from every civilization on Earth, who all seem to make their way to NYC.
The international cuisines are what I miss most about Montreal.
The Lenape ate tons and tons of oysters on the half shell, for one thing, and so did the early Dutch and English, until the oysters were all dredged out and the water went bad. That must have been nice.
I am the extremely unwilling third-party to a speakerphone dialogue. Better Half is on the phone with an absolute jackass whom he doesn’t like very much. Last week, this guy fired one of BH’s cronies. This guy is sort of BH’s peer but slightly lower in the hierarchy. Anyway, jackass is from Philadelphia and BH will revert to a Boston accent when he gets angry/excited. Listening to these two accents? I’d rather have a root canal without novocaine.
Time to get up and make yourselves some Covfefe.
Oh, believe me, I have a secret stash here in the office. Not covfefe. Lemon-flavored Absolut Citron vodka.
Time to TURN UP the East German propaganda radio!
I was going to put this on, take all my clothes off, ask my dog to join me in a little modified dance rouine, and turn it up to top volume:
That would get him off the phone pretty quickly.
It just dawned on me to respond that the numbers radio station wasn’t propaganda, it was actually coded military movement commands. Kind of. So the signal would come in, you heard that in the video, and the German you’re hearing are just single digit numbers. So what that woman is saying is something like “7 7 0 6 4 4 7 7…” but people had codebooks, and it could mean anything. You could hear this in West Berlin, if you knew the radio signal. When I stayed in that small West Berlin hotel/almost like a hostel near the Wall the proprietor was a huge fan of that radio station, he was like a ham radio operator, so I asked him what this was all about. He said, “I don’t know, they keep changing the codebooks, but I bet they’re talking about you. At least once a day.”
“Me? Why?”
“Because you’re an American and you’re crossing over there every day and doing your research. Nobody does this. Who wants to go back to that time?”
“A lot can be learned from the past (‘Vergangenheit.’)”
“Easy for you to say, American Mattie.”
…number stations were a whole thing, if I remember rightly…like a one-way communication deal for agents who were generally in the “we don’t know who you’re talking about” category…so all they needed was somewhere quiet & a radio & at a particular pre-arranged time “their” numbers would let them run a one-time-pad routine & it would tell them something
…maybe other stuff…there were boundless theories about them for a while but iirc that one got confirmed along the way
…there’s a largely forgettable john cusack movie (I think called the number station?) where he’s working shifts reading the numbers…either way…I remember sometimes they came up on an old bakelite radio my grandmother had…along with the police band that was much easier to understand…though the numbers ones might have been on the longwave band…not the UHF/VHF (forget which) the police showed up on
…who knew a radio old enough to have a longer dial to turn through was all it took to reach the bands that were verboten?
…not me, certainly…not until years later, anyway…if the police had had more to do where my grandmother lived maybe I’d have figured it out sooner…but it’s true what they say…they don’t make ’em like they used to
I am still getting over the fact that my English friends (who, granted, grew up in a class several levels above my own) now still have Aga Cookers. “I thought this was something out of a Monty Python sketch.” “What are you talking about? Don’t you have stoves in America?”
…old-school oil-fired…or fancy modern ones that run off the electric?
…that grandmother had one of the oil-fired ones…leaning against it after shedding cold/muddy gear at the backdoor (which had the boiler in to leave that stuff to dry beside) & thence into the kitchen after a long walk with the dog(s) is possibly my version of proust’s madeleines?
They must have the new versions, although I think they’re gas-fired. The best thing about them is they have access to “country bread” (they live in the Home Counties and have access to “rustic” or “country” or “farmers'” bread and they don’t have toaster ovens, so in to the Aga it goes to toast) and that is absolutely delicious. I know a couple who know a couple who are cheesemakers. The woman is close to the woman cheesemaker. The non-cheesemaker husband of my friend explained, when we went to visit, about the cheesemaking couple, “They have no idea what they’re doing, but the guy’s in line to inherit, so they have to look like they’re doing something.”
“Inherit what?”
“Quite a bit of real estate, but not a seat in the House of Lords, because of that shithead—“
…gas-fired is (I think) as close to the oil thing as they make these days (not honestly sure – you might still be able to get the oil version if you’re not on the grid in gas terms & I’ve still seen a few tanks in places too new to have had them from way back) but the electric ones confuse me
…rayburn’s were “the other sort” I think…but they didn’t lean into the storage heater aspect of things the way agas were designed to
…cooking on/in them is more art than science, though…every time you open an oven door or flip the cover off a hotplate it starts to slowly lose some of that heat…so if you need both hotplates & a couple of ovens to rustle up a sunday roast…& have it ready “on time”…knowing when to start what remained well above my paygrade until I was probably a teenager?
I once went (I was actually staying in the house) to a Sunday roast dinner. One of the older guests had just made it out of the (private) hospital after suffering a heart attack, so the hostess, my friend, decided to make something healthy. It was incredible. The meat, the grease, the fats, the sauces.
I said, in the kitchen, because I was trying to help out, but Agas are very tricky, so I was like a sous chef, “Friend, your friend just suffered a near-fatal heart attack and had a triple bypass. This isn’t—”
“Isn’t what? I got it from [high-end local grocery] and the Aga…”
So we served it, and it was a very funny and very English setting, because they don’t really believe in replacing anything unless absolutely necessary, and it’s very vulgar to buy something like a piece of silverware or furniture when someone would just leave it to you.
So I got talking to the heart attack survivor and his wife, over the Sunday roast, and I asked, “Did your doctor mention anything about post-surgery diet?”
And his wife said to me, “You’re not one of those fucking vegetarians are you?” She was probably close to 70. I said no. She was distantly related to the Royal Family, but it was one of those several different in-law-marriage things.
My grandmother was from Bahh-stahn, and you could tell how mad she was by how many “R”s she dropped. Boy, she could “pahhk the cahh in the yahhd” with the best of them.
Another tell was by how many names it took her to find mine. Her sisters, my mom, my sister… if the cat’s names made it in there, I’d better be running already!
I, personally, went to a university with lots of kids and professors from all over the place, so we all kind of adopted the Midwestern Tom Brokaw broadcaster accent to be mutually intelligible. That’s what I still speak to this day. I also pick up accents very easily, so when I used to go up to visit my favorite relatives, the Quebecois, it would take me a couple of days to shake off the accent upon my return. “Hiring” cars. “Muntreal.”
Sometimes, when I get very drunk, I start sounding like Edith Bunker. “I’m foine.”
Since this is my post:
Nick Kyrgios! One of the hottest men to ever live. Believe me, if I ever got my hands on him, I’d give him a reason to live, and he wouldn’t pull that bullshit on me like he did with some of his girlfriends:
https://nypost.com/2023/06/14/suicidal-nick-kyrgios-admitted-into-psych-ward-after-2019-wimbledon-loss/