
Happy Birthday, F. Scott Fitzgerald – swell writer, husband to a screwy skirt, boozehound.

Fitzgerald’s favorite hooch was the gin rickey.
- 2 oz gin
- 1/2 oz freshly squeezed lime juice
- 4 oz club soda
- lime wedge
Fill a highball glass with ice, add gin and lime juice. Top with club soda, garnish with lime wedge.
Dipping your bill, Deadsplinters? What’s your choice of giggle juice? I think I’ll put down some panther sweat. Off the tiger milk? Don’t take a powder, beat your gums about something else. It’s all copacetic.
Is James Ellroy writing for us now?
Dammit, you blew my cover!
welp…i drink 3 things regularly….and this time of night on a friday…. im not drinking coffee or water
also…after two whole weeks back on the job….ive decided i had enough of that shit again…and took next week off
then…assuming i dont use my remaining 40 hours of time off before dec 31st…ill have enough holiday time next year…to take every friday off…and a couple mondays too….or you know…take 6 weeks at once…thatll be nice
Every Friday sounds wonderful. But 6 weeks at one time does too. What to do, what to do…
ill probably take 3 weeks off…and random fridays and mondays when it suits me
but should a bigly trip somewhere wonderful become viable…its nice to have the option of 6 weeks
@farscythe My dad worked in a steel mill. After so many years the workers got a one time 13 weeks off. My dad had also saved up some other PTO. He took off 3 months. We didn’t go anywhere though, he used the time to build an addition on the house. He was a handy guy.
@Hannibal 13 weeks used to be attainable here….. but the gubment capped us plebs
no longer allowed to carry over more than 40 hours from one year to the next
my contract gives me 200 hours anually …so plus 40 im at 6 weeks…and thats the most i can get
+11 days most of which the company determines….soo.. basically xmas/newyears week and a couple others
basically the overpaid wankers in politics have decided you cant forego time off for a year or two to have the holiday of a lifetime coz working that much is bad for you
(to which i say……fuck you…if i dont need time off…i dont need time off…dont need yous telling me what i am or am not capable of taking…i can feel that shit….shoulda just stuck to making sure companies honour the time off you are owed as a worker)
daammmmmmnnnn, I thought it was real solid when I hit an anniversary earlier this year and moved up to 4 weeks of vacation a year. The most time I’ve ever been off was when my son was born and I took just under 4 weeks (which back then I had to scrounge and save for a while because I didn’t get nearly as much vacay)
I think I get 5 weeks starting next year, but I’ll believe that when I see it.
Just got back from the Homebrew store which now has coolers of some of the best beers in the area. I got a few fresh hop beers & some random IPA’s. Tomorrow I harvest my hops and brew my fresh hop IPA for the year and next weekend is the actual Fresh Hop Festival. I am so excited they didn’t cancel it! I’m a few hours from Happy Hour today but will probably start with a margarita before switching to beer.
So it’s Hoppy Hour. I’ll show myself out.
Yes! I just made Gin Rickeys last week, precisely because F. Scott Fitzgerald liked them so much.
On the menu today are scotch ‘n sodas, a favorite of Winston Churchill’s and countless others. He liked to start his day with Champagne, who wouldn’t, have (lots of) wine with meals, and tipple from the scotch bottle. I think he finished his days with brandies, but I’m not sure. He lived to be 90. Carrie Nation, famous temperance movement leader who used to burst into bars with her mob and destroy liquor bottles, only lived to be 64.
Winston Churchill’s full name was Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, because he was also from the noble Spencer family, but the Churchills have a very fine pedigree too. He and the late Princess of Wales, Diana Spencer, are distantly related.
There’s the famous exchange supposedly between Churchill and Bessie Braddock (if Churchill said it, it’s an old joke that long preceded him)
“Sir, you are drunk.”
“And you, Bessie, are ugly. But I shall be sober in the morning, and you will still be ugly.”
The problem, of course, is that there’s a strong chance Churchill wouldn’t be sober in the morning….
I’ve heard that one before. There are a lot of good off-the-cuff quotes attributed to Churchill.
I know one about the famously reticent Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge. At a dinner one of his tablemates said, “Mr. President, my friend bet me $5 that I wouldn’t be able to get three words out of you.”
Coolidge’s response: “You lose.”
There’s also a strong chance that Churchill, who resembled an adult-sized crabby baby, would also wake up the next morning ugly, sober or not.
He started the day with champagne and still managed to save Europe? Damn, a couple of Mimosafor brunch and I’m done for the day,
I just picked up a sixer of a Belgian style dark beer from one of my favorite local breweries. I’m not sure why I haven’t gotten it recently. We had friends over a couple of weeks ago and they brought a bottle of Chimay. I’d forgotten how much I like that kind of beer.
I recently took some photos of a pet cemetery at a house the Fitzgeralds once visited. I’ll have to post them if I can ever sort through my image folder.
I’d like to see that. Slightly creepy with a literary connection. That’s my kinda thing.
When I drank booze (I gave it up after my friend got sick), I preferred the old imperial standby of Gin and Tonic. I like Bombay Sapphire (the bottle is cool looking-not the best attribute to buy booze though), Tanqueray and when I could afford it, Hendricks.
I discovered (painfully) early in my teens that cheap gin is an abomination.
It’s my humble opinion that all gin is an abomination. But I’m wrong about a lot of things.
I like Hendrick’s…not much else.
I also have Broker’s atop my little bar but anything topped with a plastic bowler hat is hard to take seriously.
See, I’d buy it just for the top hat! I once bought a beer in a Buddha shaped bottle, and I don’t even drink beer.
My go-to is a G&T, with Hendrick’s the preferred gin. Or a Pimm’s + lemonade if I’m feeling like a walking stereotype. Then a nice glass of [red] wine, medium-to-full bodied. As of late, I don’t like a heavily tannic wine the way I did in my youth. And, while I’m not a beer person, I do appreciate a good saison or gueuze, preferably Belgian.
@meh-zuzah I used to like wine but the older I get the more I find myself drinking bourbon or cocktails made with bourbon.
Thanks to that deadbeat Hemmingway, I tried grappa the last time I was in Italy. Cannot recommend it, but I probably had some pretty suspect stuff.
One side of my family is Italian and we had grappa at all the holidays. Nasty stuff, it’s like drinking paint thinner.
Oh good, glad it wasn’t just me. I jokingly coughed out a few words of critique for my friends: “Getting hints of oven cleaner and despair with a long, dry finish, here….”
oh, I think that was a trendy thing around here a few years before fernet branca(sp?) became the popular hipster drink. I never got around to trying it, and now I have a anti-trend contrarian knee-jerk reaction to trying either of those things.
My daughter and her friends are into fernet, and a bunch of other weird botanicals
After work I wandered around a good grocery store trying to figure out what I wanted for dinner. No sushi I liked already made. Nothing good in the hot bar. Didn’t want cold cuts.
Then I got in the car and was like do I want nachos? Do I want a cheeseburger? What do I actually want?
The answer was not food, so I came home and made an omelet for dinner and am currently enjoying my 2nd glass of moscato.
That sounds like a nice dinner. I love a simple omelette.
It was great! I added some shredded parmesan and I had sliced peppers from my garden so it was nice and bright.