— and the taste of a good whisky as well.

Doctors offer new prohibitions on drinking for the older set. I’ve been exceeding these limits since before the researchers were born, thank you very much. What doesn’t surprise me is that the “risky” drinkers are the happy ones.

I throw in my lot with Bill Ott, who writes, “teetotaling fiction tastes flat to me.” In memoriam, a scribe who never dried up:

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”

— James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

“I saw her for the first time that afternoon. It was too hot to do much but sit in an air-conditioned apartment. I’d spent the morning waking up and writing checks to creditors, and in another hour it would be four o’clock and I could add brandy to my coffee without feeling guilty about it. For the time being I was feeling guilty.”

— Lawrence Block, The Naked and the Deadly

The bartender came over. It looked like the wrong bar for cognac but that’s all I drink. I asked for Courvoisier.

“You want the Three-Star or the VSOP?”

Life is filled with surprises.

— Lawrence Block, The Naked and the Deadly

Small wonder one finds oneself drinking more and more at home, given governments’ general hostility toward the constituents of a proper boozer. The Colony Room will soon be shuttered.

‘I see it as my living room, and my only real goal is to send people away happier than when they came in. The drink helps. But it is today so, so difficult. Paperwork and petty laws. It takes great skill to make Soho not Soho, but they’re doing a hell of a job.’

Biologists report that the walrus, while possessing a highly developed sense of humor, suffers from an insufficiently evolved palate.

DEWAR’S 18-YEAR-OLD FOUNDERS RESERVE, BLENDED

All right, guys, keep in mind that I’m new to this. I taste… fruit. Berries, maybe — or grapes. Oh, and it’s also sort of peppery, but then there’s this sweet and sour taste underneath. And — whoa — now my throat is burning. God, it really hurts. How’s this: a Dr-Pepper-and-Chinese-takeout smoothie, and also I’m a sword swallower who just swallowed a sword but screwed it up somehow.

Mark Bittman, writing for the New York Times, asks:

Why not make cocktails from scratch, ignoring the names and acknowledging your preferences?

No doubt he was schooled by one of those forward-thinking history teachers who told him that it wasn’t necessary to learn dates or, heaven forbid, facts. If a London cabbie must memorize his A-Z before he’s allowed the run of the streets, shouldn’t a licensed mixologist be required to learn the proper proportions for a thousand or so of the most popular cocktails? Does this Bittman truly believe that bartending is less important than driving?

“Colin Miller pulled out a hip flask, took a swig, then offered it to Logan: rusty nail, the mixture of whisky and Drambuie going down like alcoholic central heating.”

— Stuart MacBride, Flesh House

The painter Leopold Segedin creates not only with the brush but also with the swizzle stick. An aficianado of the gin manhattan, he has taken the time to share with us the theory and practice of martinis. I was quite taken with this quote from Bunuel:

.…it was said that the making of a dry martini should resemble the Immaculate Conception, for, as St. Thomas Aquinas once noted, the generative power of the Holy Ghost pierced the Virgin’s hymen ‘like a ray of sunlight through a window – leaving it unbroken’.

“I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.”

— George Best