I've still got dreams that keep me from worrying about my age

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* Cornell student studies moonshine whiskey. excerpt:

"It’s hard to quantify the state of euphoria that the arrival of the moonshine put me in. All of the ignorant assumptions I had made about southern culture were actually coming true! The entirety of southern life apparently did only consist of drunken tailgate rallies, shady hustlers with cryptic names, bathtub breweries and illegal goods delivered in Santa hats. The fact that delivering anything wrapped in a Santa hat would immediately draw suspicion to it didn’t even dawn on me — nor did the fact that what I was about to drink could very well be chlorox and lye colored red with food dye. I knew that such an opportunity for enlightenment may never present itself me again, and I refused to let it slip by.

"Of course, I expected something drastic to happen upon consumption. Judging by the stories my cousin had told Alex and I, the average college party in Florida consisted of people lighting their chests on fire and trying to fight squads of police officers. And these kids didn’t even have moonshine! It seemed to me that drunken abandon and the South went hand in hand, so naturally I assumed that moonshine, the very touchstone of southern drinking culture, would immediately send me into a state of permanent, violent psychosis. I was very excited.

"Well, unsurprisingly, both of us were disappointed. All of my mythologizing and base assumptions about the drink, born no doubt from my solipsistic northern elitism, proved to have no justification whatsoever. I won’t deny that moonshine tastes like shit — it does. Imagine taking a half-filled bottle of Wild Turkey and filling the rest with Robitussin and you might have some idea of what it tasted like. Actually, what we drank may very well have been a jar of whiskey and cough syrup — we’ll never know. The ambiguity of moonshine is both thrilling and terrifying."

* the jazz / thomas pynchon connection. excerpt:

"Pynchon's first novel V (1961) includes a minor character named McClintic Sphere. Pynchon introduces him in a remarkable section with a whole series of links, allusions, echoes, and satirical reflections of the late 1950's and Ornette Coleman's legendary Five Spot appearance in Greenwich Village.

"The section starts with several of the New York cast arriving at a Greenwich Village nightclub called the V-Note:

"1. V for the title of the novel and an elusive woman, object of a novel-long search by one of the characters.

"2. V as in the Roman Numeral for Five = Five Spot. This famous club featured Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane (1957) in a legendary engagement; it was the nightclub where Ornette Coleman first opened in November 1959 (and where he played a number of times over the following years)

"3. V-Note. The Note = Half Note. Another Greenwich Village club, and another venue at which Coleman played during the period McClintic Sphere is playing onstage when the group enters. Sphere is Thelonious Monk's middle name (Monk was a frequent performer in the village at the time and as noted is closely associated with the Five Spot).

"McClintic may be an echo of Coleman's unusual first name. (The only jazz musician with a somewhat similar first name would be Kenny Dorham, whose given first name was McKinley. He performed regularly in New York during that period and may be associated with groups that played the Five Spot)."

* "We have reached the paralytic stage of Bush spin, where a large percentage of the population are ready to forget the horrors they’ve just seen and felt, in return for comforting lies -- lies they can live with. A large proportion of people are willing to place major responsibility for the recent bloodbath on the Gulf Coast on media-targeted scapegoats -- both local officials and the victims themselves -- in exchange for the ability to deny the most threatening portion of the Bush response: the active intervention of the federal government to prevent outside help from getting in. This was not neglect, incompetence, or failure. This was what Rummy calls a 'catastrophic success.'(...)We have to figure out a way to help disaster victims -- and all the victims of globalization -- without unintentionally feeding the circling vultures." -- Patricia Goldsmith [via]

* the shit's about to hit the fan: Fitzgerald indictments to shake up white house.

* Indie rock's favorite drinks. [via]