Words On Wednesday

To me, Scotch has a sort of classy aura that many other spirits lack. I’m not going to claim to be a connoisseur, as I have tried very few variants of Scotch, but Costco’s Kirkland Signature Blended Scotch Whisky is a solid distilled spirit at a reasonable price. It certainly doesn’t compete with the higher end Scotch offerings available from Costco or other liquor stores, but it holds its own, and I would say it is undeniably drinkable. Basically any Scotch, or “Scotch whisky” if we’re being proper, is known to have flavors of smoke and peat. Honestly, I didn’t know what peat was before looking it up, and I still don’t know what it smells or tastes like, but I do recognize some common properties across the Scotch brands that I have tried. The smoke flavor is undeniable, and seems to be the biggest hurdle to those trying Scotch for the first time. Coming from the sweet molasses flavor of rum or the mostly inert flavor of vodka, Scotch has a bold and strong flavor profile that can ...

I’ve been looking for a new monthly segment to complement Thirsty Thursday Eve , and I feel like a “book report” or sorts would be the perfect idea for it. Making a monthly obligation to write about a book or short story that I’ve read accomplishes a number of goals. First and foremost, it gives me more incentive to read. I love reading, I just don’t have much free time to do it lately. Committing to at least one piece per month is a fairly low investment, I’d say. Plus, with my recent discovery of how awesome audiobooks are, I can listen to the book while I work. Setting aside 15 hours or so of uninterrupted time during a month for reading is difficult. Listening to 15 hours of audio while I work is something I already do in less than a week with music. I enjoyed writing the originally one-off book report on  John Updike’s “A&P” a while back, but if this is going to become a regular thing, I want to give it a little more structure. Most importantly, I want to have posts t...

Date formats are not something that many people have any sort of opinion on, but it is something that I find very polarizing and I’ll explain why. The two date formats that I probably see most often are MM-DD-(CC)YY and DD-MM-(CC)YY, with the former being more prominent in the United States and the latter seeming to be the preferred format of European countries and elsewhere in the world. Maybe it aligns with use of the Metric system versus Imperial units, I’m not really certain. Either way, I think both options are terrible. First and foremost, they are terribly ambiguous. Without a definite indicator or a value higher than 12, the month and date could be interchangeable. Take today’s date, for example. September 12, 2018 as I will list it formally, could be represented as 09-12-2018 or 12-09-2018. Let’s not even get into the option of excluding the century from the year, as we all know of the headache that caused with Y2K. Without a clear context, those dates could alternatively ...

I do not care for tomatoes. For the past few months, however, I’ve been trying to change that. Nearly everybody I know seems to love tomatoes. Maybe it’s the geographical region of the American southeast or some sort of confirmation bias since I don’t frequently ask people directly if they eat tomatoes, but I know many more people who eat tomatoes than those who do not. And this isn’t a matter of, “I’ll eat it, but I don’t really care one way or the other.” No, most of these people love some tomatoes. And they’ll rave about how much better fresh tomatoes are than store bought, and such. I’ve tried tomatoes several times through my life, and I’ve never really cared for them. It isn’t really the taste. I’ll eat tomatoes cooked into stuff, or I’ll eat salsa provided it’s a more pureed consistency. It’s the texture that I don’t care for. The goopy innards of tomatoes remind me of the sort of semi-rotten thing that you might accidentally squeeze too hard and have it just fall apart in y...