Liquid Sexy

Today is Independence Day in the United States, a holiday when we yankee folks recall our country's successful bid for autonomy from our colonial rulers in the English crown over 200 years ago. It's a day to celebrate liberty and all the things we love about our nation. While there are a lot of things to appreciate about America (its dense cross-section of different cultures, its unparalleled contribution to the art of film and its varied landscape to name a few), one of my personal favorite things about our sovereign union is its most popular native liquor: Bourbon whiskey. A lot of cultures have a unique variety of whiskey to their claim and it's for that reason that America has bourbon today. Many of our 18th century immigrants were of Scottish and Irish descent, so they brought their craft for whiskey making with them to these shores. There's a very interesting history to just how bourbon became the whiskey Americans know and love today. It involves war, two great historical figures and a staple of American agriculture.

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I'm more likely to turn my nose up to a drinking game than indulge in it. Most drinking games are at best an excuse to do something you were going to do anyway and at worst an ill-advised collection of bad ideas that will almost certainly result in porcelain worship. Really, the majority of drinking games are just logical conclusions of bad drinking behavior. Take beer pong, for instance. It's a game that takes the inherently vile experience of chugging cheap pilsner and makes it somehow more disgusting by adding a dirty table, a wet ping pong ball and the hands of drunk strangers. People ought not to drink cheap pilsner anyway, but beer pong just makes it worse. Movie drinking games are only marginally less stupid. Sure, taking a shot every time Character X says Catchphrase Y will get you drunk pretty fast, but this seems like a classic case of the whole diminishing the parts. This game both distracts from the movie by reducing it to the search for a single component of it, as well as distracting from the (potential) pleasures of drinking. If you want to do shots, then just do shots. The game seems both unnecessary and less fun than it ought to be. But there is one drinking game I'm willing to endorse: Shot Roulette.

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Played in its most simple incarnation, the game of roulette has some of the best odds in any given casino. In the American version of the game, which has 36 numbered slots and 2 zero slots (the 0 and 00 as opposed to the European single 0 layout), a player who only bets on red, black, odds or evens has a 47% of winning. Even if the payout is ridiculously small, it beats losing money. During my first trip to Las Vegas, I kept those odds in mind. I've never gotten much thrill out of gambling, so the prospect of winning small and easy appealed to me much more than the thought of taking home the jackpot on a long shot. While my travel companion settled down for what I would classify as an inconsiderately lengthy tenure at the poker table, I decided to try my hand at the little wheel. Seated at a $5 table, I put the minimum on black and promptly lost. The laws of probability on my side, I tried the same thing again and watched history repeat itself. That's when the calm voice of reason in my brain stood up, cleared its throat and produced a rather well-drawn graph of a recent individual cost/benefit analysis concerning the relative merits of staying at the roulette table or adjourning to casino lounge for a drink, both of which would have cost roughly the same amount of money. Five minutes later, I had a glass of scotch in my hand and no regrets.

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Back in the particularly panicky period of American history when some of the most absurd people in the nation convinced Congress to ratify the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution, the majority of the alcohol consumed in our silly country was produced in less than optimal conditions. Bathtubs in some guy's basement, homemade stills in mob-run warehouses, barrels in the backwoods where nothing but moonshine ever flowed before. Needless to say, the products of these operations were pretty unpalatable, thus the cocktail was finally embraced wholeheartedly by the drinking American public. I suppose most of us never lost the taste for alcohol mixed with anything that would make it taste like anything other than poison.

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