Lis and I went to the bar, "Eastern Standard"

I'm WEEKS behind on things I want to blog. I haven't talked about the Boston Wine Expo, or Hebrew school two weeks ago, or all sorts of stuff. But let me just mention a couple of things.

Lis found out about a one-night class in the history of the cocktail, held at BU. Jackson Cannon, the head bartender and bar manager of Eastern Standard, the restaurant in the Commonwealth Hotel in Kenmore Square, was holding an evening seminar in which he would talk about the history and development of the cocktail, and make four historically significant cocktails for us, and explain why they were significant.

It was a FANTASTIC class. Mr Cannon is fun, engaging, and a total cocktail geek. The drinks, naturally, were delicious -- a Whiskey Smash (lemons, mint, simple syrup, whiskey, and shaved ice), a Sazerac (absinthe or substitute such as Pastis, rye, simple syrup, and Peychaud's Bitters), a flip of some sort (a drink with egg white to help it get all foamy and nice), and a sparkling wine cocktail that Cannon developed himself.

We had such fun at the class that we felt we had to go to the bar and have more fun, which we did on Wednesday.

We had a little food (I had the Offal of the Day, which was a tongue sandwich, which was cooked well enough to make it so tender that it avoided the texture problems of a lot of tongue, and Lis had the bone marrow on toast), and a bunch of drinks. They were all good, but one which I want to mention specifically is the Jack Rose, made with applejack, lemon juice, and grenadine (they make their own grenadine, which is wonderful stuff). Jackson is one of the people who started the cocktail renaissance in Boston, and he and a couple of the other guys in the "movement" used to live together. One of the first things which they did was decide to perfect the Jack Rose cocktail -- they tried different proportions, brands, garnishes, and so forth. The three of them started calling themselves "The Jack Rose Society", and it's still one of their favorite drinks. And I can see why. The thing is gee-ee-doubleyew-dee GEWD.

Anyway, at the bar, we were seated next to a gentleman who's been living at the hotel for a few weeks, and will be there for several more months. He's a gaffer on a movie that they're filming in Boston, and we were having a lot of fun talking. At one point, he mentioned just how gorgeous Lis is. Actually, he mentioned that at several points. And, of course, he was right.

I agreed, and I told him that Lis had not only a great ass, but a brain to match. He thought that, yes, those sounded like qualities of a perfect woman.

Anyway, the Eastern Standard bar is a lot of fun, although clearly on the upscale expensive side, at ten bucks a cocktail. However, those are cocktails all with fresh ingredients and top-quality liquors and liqueurs (or "spirits" and "elixirs", as Jackson calls them), made with skill and however much time it takes to make them right. I'd love to go back, but I'd want to go with more people, so we could order more different drinks and share them around.

Anyone interested?

About the Pentagon shooting down one of its own satellites

So, the Pentagon is preparing to shoot down one of its own spy satellites, prior to the satellite's orbit decay and fall to earth. They claim that the reason for this is to make sure that it breaks into enough pieces that none of it will survive re-entry, purely as a safety issue -- they don't want it to fall on anything important and hurt anyone.

Of course, when China shot down one of its own weather satellites on January 11, the US protested, pointing out that that action caused a lot of space debris and endangered other satellites, as well as it being a bad precedent for the militarization of space.

They've designed a special missile for this purpose.

A Pentagon official has stated that "this is not a test of an anti-satellite weapons system." I wish that we had a press corps with could have followed up with the obvious next question: "So, you're shooting down a satellite. If you're not using an anti-satellite weapons system, what ARE you using?"