Christmas Sunday Fun (Reading 2021)

A longer, perhaps more involved Christmas update next week (or, I forget about it and we go into 2021 with broken promises from the off, which sounds more likely), but as a Boxing Day Christmas Sunday special, here’s a list of the books I read in 2021. Well, most of them. Things without ISBN numbers aren’t included, and you can mentally add “almost everything John Smith did at 2000AD, plus a bunch of other comics” as well.

Highlights of the list? As you can probably tell, I went deep on M. John Harrison’s work this year — I’d definitely recommend the Settling The World collection of short stories, or the post-Brexit The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again novel as starting points - much easier to get hold of than some of the out-of-print books I’ve spent the year tracking down. Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts was so compelling that I stayed up until 3am one night finishing it (always a great idea). And the finale of David Peace’s Tokyo Trilogy was so long in coming that it was a complete surprise to be a pretty straight-forward affair, with only a few echoes of “At home, at Anfield” in the text¹. Now, if only he’d finish UKDK.

(and there are a few classics that I should have read many years ago. At least I understood this week’s Necromancer discourse on Twitter having finally knocked that one out)

Hope you all had a great Christmas, and see you back here later in the week²!

Just Like Christmas

Travel right now does seem like a bad idea, and maybe we’re being a little irresponsible, but it appears that my family made it onto a plane this morning to escape Plague Island and they’re on their way here for a different type of Christmas. And, I guess, a different type of American holiday, where we mainly Remain Indoors and go through my stash of LFTs. I swear, when they become reimbursable next month (whyyyyy so long???), I’m going to start buying 10-packs.

Anyway, the house is mostly ready for them — I find it amusing that I have relegated myself to the smallest bedroom and I will be again the only person in the house without a TV in their room. Just Like Christmas indeed. Plus it’s also full of cardboard boxes and an old mattress, so expect to see me on Duvet Know It’s Christmas later in the week.

I also started on the Christmas viewing! Yes, Knowing Me, Knowing Yule, but can you also believe I watched two films on Friday night, and they were both released in 2021? Amazing scenes. Admittedly, Giddy Stratospheres is set in the 2000s and Last Night In Soho has a large 60s element, but still, for me? I have never been so up-to-date!

(Giddy Stratospheres made me miss The Luminaire a lot. Just look at this:

Such a great little venue. And of course, it’s now a bunch of tiny little flats. God, how depressing they look)

Steel yourselves for more dessert pictures over the next week. The holidays are coming…

Four Days Left (Goodbye, 2021!)

Just four more work days of 2021. Not the best time for the biggest exploit in computing for years to drop…so an interesting final week at work, I guess?

Otherwise, not really an interesting week, to be honest; I’m just hoping that every goes okay in the next seven days and that my family is able to get on the plane next Sunday! Otherwise there’s going to be a lot of solo baking and I’ll have to eat my way through a forest (a chocolate one, obviously).

Now, though, it’s time to go clean the kitchen again…

The Drill That Pierces The Heavens

I’m supposed to be going to see Chvrches tonight. The first concert of the year, tickets but sometime back in or May or so. Even before Omicron landed, I wasn’t feeling it, but despite being double-vaccinated and about a month out from my booster shot…yeah, there’s absolutely no way I’m hanging out with a thousand other dancing people in close-quarters right now, even if I really like the band and don’t know when they’ll come this way again. But right now, I’d rather not let anything possibly get in the way of my family’s visit (at least the bits I can have some control over).

Also, if you’re 42, I suggest you don’t get the idea in your head to re-watch all of Gurren Lagann at a time that means you’ll finish it at 2:30am in the morning. I do love to re-watch it every couple of years, but ooof, that led to a rather tired Friday. Which probably had a hand in me picking a random old BBC drama at random on Friday night and being very surprised at seeing a lot more of Anna Friel than I was expecting. It went out on a Sunday, so I imagine we were all in the Slem’s Bar at the time it was originally broadcast back in 1998. The boomer / Gen X rivalry that underpins the film is somewhat amusing when considered from today. But boomers are always the enemy, naturally.

Finally, I’d just like to endorse this tweet with everything I have.

Christmas playlist? You mean Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody” ad nauseum for the next 21 days?

— Chloe Maveal (@PunkRokMomJeans) December 4, 2021

They Thought It Was Over — But This Was A Fantasy

The final(ish) update to But This Was A Fantasy is now up. This includes The Power of Nightmares, The Trap, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, and HyperNormalisation. With that, I’m done encoding all the series that I was planning — I’m skipping Bitter Lake because it tends to be the most graphic of all his work and unless there’s a great clamour for it, I don’t fancy adding it.

It’s pretty much done now, with filtering set up for each series and whatnot. I may return to it over the Christmas holiday to have a little bit of experimentation with the underlying FAISS index, as we’re at the point where the flat index is starting to become a bit of a bottleneck for start up and searching in general. But otherwise, a 2021 project has made it to completion! I will celebrate by not looking at the long list of things I didn’t do.

Thanksgiving 2021

Another Thanksgiving down. Perhaps a little less crazy than in previous years (only about 10 desserts, and we skipped a roast dinner this time), but I think a good time was had by all. We now move on to Christmas, which has the potential to breach 30 different puddings by the time the Advent Calendars are all open…

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M1Maxxxxxxxx

It’s now about two weeks since I got hold of the new M1Max Macbook Pro. Which is plenty of time to get adjusted to how quick it is compared to my 2018 Macbook Pro, so now it just feels like a computer rather than the lightning fast future. You get blasé about things quickly. It’s also a little odd to think that this current Mac has a direct line to the first Mac I bought almost 20 years ago now; each time, the Migration Assistant has dutifully moved everything to the new machine, meaning that I still have some programs in my Applications folder that would require the original 68k Rosetta to run¹. So many copies of Illustrator, none of which now run. Guess who will be buying Affinity Designer in this week’s upcoming sale, eh?

Anyway, it’s fast, it’s deathly quiet, and apparently it’ll be getting PyTorch support. Hurrah!

We are now moving into PRIME DESSERT SEASON. This is not a drill. I only have two more full weeks of work left in the year. I have about 30kg of flour, 40kg of chocolate, 6kg of butter, 72 eggs, and I AM READY.

Bourbon Holiday Guide 2021

Something different this week — yes, it’s finally time for a guide on the thorny subject of “I want to buy somebody some bourbon for Thanksgiving / Christmas / the New Year, but what should I get?” It’s been demanded by literally one person. Well, maybe two or three.

tl;dr

a 1.75L bottle of Wild Turkey 101 in the fancy new glass bottle would be welcomed warmly by most bourbon fans. You don’t have to over-think it. But if you do, here’s almost 3,000 words…

$20-$45

One of the nice things about bourbon is that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get something decent. If you live within the state of Kentucky, you might be able to find a bottle of 6-year Heaven Hill Green Label. It should cost you between $15 and $20 and is fantastic value for money — it drinks as well as a bottle at least twice the price. It can be a little hard to find these days, but it’s a wonderful thing to get somebody who doesn’t live in the state.

Otherwise, Wild Turkey 101 is where you need to be. A blend of 6-8 year old barrels, it’s the classic bourbon that everybody knows about, made by the same family for over 50 years. While the taste of 101 has changed somewhat over the past few decades (bottles from the 70s and 80s now go for almost $1,000 at auction!), it’s still a bold standout drink, and now comes in a rather swish glass bottle at the 750ml and 1.75l sizes. It’s a mixer, it’s something you can pour out straight, and it is a confident base in any cocktail. You almost can’t go wrong with picking this.

The Heaven Hill Mob

In addition to the 6-year Green Label bottle, Heaven Hill have an assortment of different bourbons (all made from the same recipe!) in this price range that would make wonderful Christmas presents. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the standard bottle of Elijah Craig, but you can often find store picks with a completely unique taste for around $35 (you can find two over at Mash & Grape). I’ve had a couple of these in the past — the one I had at The Aviary a few years ago was amazing. Definitely worth a gamble. If you can’t find a store pick of Elijah Craig, then maybe you’ll see Evan Williams Single Barrel, which might be the cheapest single barrel offering around at $30. Anyway, variations abound again, but it’s a solid choice. Finally, you might luck into the Heaven Hill jackpot — a bottle of Henry McKenna Single Barrel 10-year Bottled In Bond (around $40 - don’t pay more). Having won a few competitions over the last few years, these bottles tend appear and disappear very quickly, but if you see one, it’ll be appreciated by the receiver. I once finished off a bottle of this in a bar in San Francisco and the bartender lamented that they should have bought the entire barrel.

$45-70

Welcome to the sweet spot! There’s a lot of really great bottles at this price range.

Rare Breed ($40-45) & Russell’s Reserve Single Barrel ($60-70)

Back to Wild Turkey. Rare Breed is the company’s ‘premium’ offering, supposedly a blend of six, eight, and twelve year barrels, bottled at a robust 58.4 ABV. It’s basically the most bourbon of bourbon in a pretty bottle that is welcome on any home shelf.

But, that’s not all from Wild Turkey! They also have a very strong single barrel programme as part of their Russell’s Reserve brand, which allows shops to pick out barrels from their different warehouses, bottling them at 55% ABV and normally in the range of 6-10 years old. These barrels can have massive variations from the ‘traditional’ Wild Turkey taste, so if you see one, it’ll likely be unique and enthusiastically welcomed. I…currently have five different picks in my bar downstairs.

(Wild Turkey actually has another single barrel programme called Kentucky Spirit, which are single barrels proofed down to the traditional 101 proof. The old selling point of Spirit was the amazing bottle it used to come in, but in the last two years, the bottle has been phased out. Unless you know the barrel is outstanding, go for the Russell’s Reserve barrels)

Four Roses Small Batch Select ($60-65)

Four Roses is somewhat unique in the industry in that it has 10 different bourbon recipes (Wild Turkey just has one!). Their cheaper Small Batch ($30) bottle contains a blend of all 10 bourbons, but this Small Batch Select is a little more restrained with just six, each aged for a little longer than the standard batch, and even skips the somewhat standard chill filtering process, resulting in a spicy, full-bodied affair.

Maker’s Mark FAE-02 ($65)

The standard Maker’s Mark release is, well, fine. It’s pretty inoffensive and a little boring. Smooth and dull. But! Don’t write off the entire company! Maker’s Mark Cask Strength is so much better that you’d almost believe it was from a completely different brand, and you can normally find it for around $35, making it a good value buy. But for a seasonal recommendation, see if you can find a bottle of their 2021 FAE-02 release, where the barrels making the batch have had French oak staves inserted into them, bumping up the caramel and vanilla taste profile. I haven’t had it yet (I just found a bottle this weekend and I’m not drinking until December), but the reviews coming in online are really good.

Wild card: WB Saffell ($45)

This is technically a release by Campari, though it was blended by Eddie Russell of Wild Turkey (Campari are the current owners of Wild Turkey, but the Russells have been there for decades). This is a blend of six, eight, ten, and twelve year barrels, and it is one of the best I’ve ever had. There are a couple of catches, though. Firstly, it came out in 2019 as a limited release, so it might be a little hard to find¹. Secondly, although it technically costs $45, you only get 375ml for that, whereas all the other bottles listed here are 750ml. So perhaps not the best value, but would make a fun little Christmas present, I’m sure!

The Craft Zone (New Riff $40-60)

Once you get into the $45 and up range of bottles, you may be distracted by all sorts of different labels. You’re entering the craft distillery price point. One of the slightly odd things about bourbon production is that, in comparison to something like beer, the big producers tend to make a much better product than the small distilleries. There’s a number of reasons for this — bigger operations often have a larger range of aged barrels that they can add into their blends, they larger stills and rickhouses, and well, they’ve just been doing it longer and know what they’re doing. Craft bourbon, on the other hand, can vary from good to drain cleaner. Something else to watch out for is if the bourbon they’re selling is ‘sourced’ — check the label to see if it’s distilled in a different state to where the craft company is based. If the label says it was distilled in Indiana…well, as I’ll explain later, it’s probably decent, but you can most likely do better at the same price point.

Anyway, there are a few good craft labels out there (Starlight & Wilderness Trail, for example). But I’ll highlight a local company — New Riff, based just across the Ohio River in Northern Kentucky. Their standard 4-year bourbon is good, their single barrels are great, and apparently their new 6-year Malted Rye is amazing.

$70-100

This price point is really the final one before things get crazy. Again, you have to be careful about craft distilleries putting very young bourbon in fancy bottles here (_stares at Rabbit Hole_). But there are some really wonderful bottles here if you know where to look…

Barrel Picks

You’ll find the majority of store barrel picks at this price range nowadays. Sadly, they have also been hit by the bourbon boom; whereas once they were plentiful, they now often disappear the day the shop puts them out on the shelves. Still, if you come across a Four Roses Single Barrel pick (they have them for all 10 different recipes!), a Maker’s Mark Private Selection, or a 10+year Knob Creek bottle, you’re almost certainly getting a good deal.

Barrell Seagrass

Barrell are a company that leans in heavily on their blending skills. They have produced over 30 batches of bourbon produced by blending from so many different sources all over the country that they end up with something unique in every batch. And then there’s their specialties, where they take the various different bourbons they’ve bought, stick them in other barrels for further finishing, and then blend them together to produce something wild. Last year, they came out with Armida (imagine a whiskey that tastes of…pears), but this year they’ve excelled themselves with Seagrass. Okay, it’s technically not a bourbon, as it’s a blend of American and Canadian ryes that have been individually finished in rum, Madeira, and apricot brandy barrels…and then blended together to form something else entirely. There’s nothing quite like it, so it’d make a great gift for somebody wanting something a little different.

Elijah Craig Barrel Proof ($70)

Welcome back to Heaven Hill. Three times a year, the company releases a special offering of Elijah Craig, aged 12 years and at barrel proof (which tends to range from 60% to an eye-popping 70.5% ABV. You can’t even take the latter on a plane!). They can sometimes be plentiful, sometimes more like gold dust, but always a dependable choice of a classic bourbon recipe.

Remus Reserve I-V ($90)

About twenty miles from where I live lies one of the biggest open secrets of the bourbon & rye world. In Lawrenceburg, Indiana, there’s a company called MGP and it has a massive distillery that goes back to Prohibition and the 19th century. Until recently, MGP didn’t really sell its products itself — it distilled all sorts of things and sold them to companies that wanted gin, grain neutral spirits, and of course, whiskey. Their rye whiskey is what you’ll find in Angel’s Envy Rye, Dickel Rye, and yes, even Bulleit Rye. Their massive stocks of aged bourbon helped fuel the last decade’s boom as craft distilleries snapped up their 8-12 year barrels to bottle and sell whilst they were waiting for their own bourbon to age (which often ended up being a problem, as the switchover to their own recipe tended to be of lesser quality than MGP’s). These days, MGP doesn’t have quite the same level of stocks of bourbon to sell to others that they once did - it’s more in the 4-7 year range now, and they are getting into the act of selling their wares direct to the customers. The Remus Reserve line is their flagship offering, a blend of 12+year bourbons at 50% ABV, and comes in a lovely Art Deco-style bottle. This year’s bottle, V, is quite hard to find, but you can often find II, III, or IV on the shelves in smaller shops.

Russell’s Reserve 13 Year ($70)

You won’t find this. This bottle is currently being flipped for $400-500 on Facebook, and it’s not worth that. But if you do stumble upon it in a shop that somehow has a bottle, buy it. It’s the oldest mainline Wild Turkey bottle produced since the 90s, bottled at close to barrel proof, non-chill filtered, and perhaps the best bourbon release of the year. I have not found a bottle and it makes me sad.

$100+

You should really think twice about spending this sort of money on bourbon — diminishing returns set in very quickly once you break the $100 barrier. Honestly, if you want to spend this sort of money, you’re better off buying multiple cheaper bottles.

Most of what you’ll find on the shelves at this price will be from smaller companies, who have bought bourbon stocks from the major bourbon producers and are selling this (normally 10+ years old) bourbon at a premium whilst the company’s own bourbon is ageing in barrels. And…well, there’s nothing wrong with that, but the days of amazing 15 year old MGP bourbon being available to craft companies are long gone. These days, you’ll likely be buying a something that originally comes from the Dickel distillery in Tennessee, which tends to have a polarising mineral aftertaste. Go and buy a bottle of Dickel 8 Year Old Bourbon instead if you really want that (it’s only $32!).

But what of “Pappy?” sigh Okay, well, first, you’re not going to find it in on the shelves. The only real chance you’ll have of getting a bottle will be to enter and win a lottery from a shop or the state alcohol board (America is weird), and your chances of winning those will be slim. But should you even go to the trouble? The mystique around Pappy Van Winkle is vastly overblown; it’s been over a decade or so since it contained the last stocks of the legendary Stitzel-Weller stocks that its reputation was built on. These days, it’s really not much more than specially chosen barrels from Buffalo Trace. It’s good…but it’s not a life-changing experience and I’d say that most of what you can buy in the $45-100 range can be just as good or better. So, no lotteries, no queuing for ten hours (or more!) outside shops, or descending into the murky world of trying to buy a bottle from a random person from Facebook (fakes are abound, and it is technically illegal within the US to personally sell or buy without some sort of license).

If you absolutely must spend over $100, then I’d look for higher-priced single barrel picks to start with. Angel’s Envy picks are somewhat rare and normally pretty great, so if you can find one, it’s a good choice. You might come across a Master’s Keep expression from Wild Turkey — these used to languish in the corner of smaller shops, so keep an eye out for those. Finally, the annual Four Roses Limited Edition release is always a strong offering; it tends to be somewhat hard to come by in the USA, but you can often get hold of a 700ml EU version from UK suppliers if you keep an eye out around Christmas time.

Absolutely Don’t:

• Buy whiskey stones. They really don’t work.
• Buy Hudson Bourbon. Ever.
• Try to buy anything from Instagram. It’ll always be a scam.

Omissions

Some of you may have reached this point and are yelling “you didn’t recommend anything from Buffalo Trace???” And no, I didn’t. Because what would be the point? When is the last time you’ve seen a bottle of Eagle Rare or Stagg Jr. on the shelf, let alone anything from the Antique Collection? Yes, BT makes some fine bourbons, but because almost everything they make is so hyped, recommending anything seems a waste of time. But sure, Buffalo Trace is a fine $20 bourbon (but WT101 is better), Blanton’s is a pretty bottle but nothing special, Stagg Jr. is great if you can find it, Weller varieties are fine, but Maker’s Cask Strength is just as good and you can pick that up at almost every shop in the nation. And obviously, the limited annual releases that make up the Antique Collection are almost always great, but your only chance of getting them is trawling Facebook and spending $700+. They’re not that good, and I’d rather not feed their hype any further.

Also, I swear I’m not paid by the word by the Wild Turkey street team…

Boosted.

On the same day as Big Bird, no less.

I got the COVID-19 vaccine today! My wing is feeling a little sore, but it'll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy.

Ms. @EricaRHill even said I’ve been getting vaccines since I was a little bird. I had no idea!

— Big Bird (@BigBird) November 6, 2021

I wish I had more for you this week. And I did do some things this week, but I’m not talking about them in order not to jinx them. If, sometime next year, you see a big, non-work announcement here, then you can think “aha, that’s what he was referring to vaguely that weekend in November.”

Now, though, I think I’m just going to crawl back into bed…

Tied To The 90s

Given all the talk about “Meta” this week, I decided to finally go off and read all of Shade: The Changing Man, one of the classic 90s Vertigo titles (and one of the few big series that isn’t out in a complete run of graphic novel collections). And…my, did I hate it by the end. I’ll admit that reading seventy issues of it in a day instead of six years probably is part of that, but my, is it a book filled with relentless depictions of violence, rape, and mutilation, especially directed towards women.

You see it in a lot of Vertigo titles from this time — e.g. Hellblazer and House of Secrets suffer from it too, and that’s before you get to things like Preacher and how badly parts of Transmetropolitan have aged in light of what Ellis did behind the scenes, but it’s really taken to nasty levels in Shade.

(I have Milligan’s Enigma coming in a couple of weeks, and I’m suddenly a little apprehensive about it, but hopefully eight issues versus seventy go a long way to not making it as traumatic a read)

And somehow it’s pretty much November. Below freezing temperatures this upcoming week, and I’ll be turning the heating on for the first time since February. Oh, and a booster shot next Saturday!