It’s a little late to be tasting holiday beers, but I found the Delirium Tremens holiday beer, their Noël, in the wine department of DeLaurenti’s at Pike Place Market on Saturday and had to check it out. This holiday beer, like the Orchard Street Jingle Ale, is spiced; unlike the Jingle Ale, the Delirium Tremens has a depth of flavor and a sweet bready aftertaste from the complex yeast strains used that keeps you guessing about the flavor. Is it cinnamon? ginger? just fantastic after-flavors from the fermentation? God knows but it’s good.
Day: January 14, 2003
Francisco Toro: ex-NYT Venezualan blogger
Francisco Toro was apparently asked by his editor, Patrick Lyons, at the New York Times to stop blogging, as it apparently raised the specter of conflict of interest. I suspect the real issue, as he suggests in his open letter to Lyons, was his activism. At any rate, he has quit the paper and unshuttered his blog, and I think it will continue to prove to be the best way to understand the chaos that continues in Venezuala.
Blogroll update: great writers new and old
Two additions to the blogroll, both of whom belong in some sort of canon or other: Samuel Pepys and William Gibson. Two blogs, two very different writers. To misquote Dickens, Pepys is dead, to begin with. But Phil Gyford is turning Pepys’s diary into a daily blog. Good reading and the comments (aka “annotations”) are fascinating. The ninth features such discussions as the date of the arrival of coffee in London and a discussion of Parliamentary politics after the age of Cromwell.
William Gibson is, of course, not dead (he’s just resting). So far since his blog started a week ago he’s kept it daily and is writing about topics as diverse as his life, his pets, and his books. Great entry today about Joseph Cornell, whom I discovered through Gibson’s description of his works in Count Zero. Through it all, there’s a refreshing humanity and lack of pretense:
Well, you might try keeping mind that behind whatever mediated projection of “William Gibson” we’re both, in our different ways, complicit in, there’s a guy who once sat on the cold kitchen floor in his bathrobe, trying rather unsuccessfully to squirt disturbingly black fluid down the throat of a small, intensely uncooperative dog.