meandering wildlyjohnath in blog form

Amy has an uncle named Fred. Fred’s an interesting guy for lots of reasons, but of interest at the moment is that when he drinks wine, he cuts it 50/50 with ginger ale. I used to think he did this only with a particular batch of home-brew wine that was, to normal wine, what the bags of concentrated coca-cola syrup are to fountain drinks; dilution with that stuff is wholly appropriate.

But no. He does this with all wine. I think that’s fantastic. If that allows him to have a pleasant wine experience (champagne every day!) then more power to him, and what’s even better is that he can continue to enjoy even very cheap wine because the dilution softens some of the harsher effects of buying economy brands. Fine by me.

But I don’t do it myself, because I enjoy what’s involved in developing a palette for wine. I enjoy the vast spectrum of flavours you can come to appreciate, and I feel like cutting it with ginger ale would impair my ability to enjoy that: different strokes for different folks, that’s all.

I’m the same with chocolate: give me high-percentage, uncut, dark chocolate and I am a happy guy. I’m not stupid about it – I don’t turn up my nose at Hershey the way a good aficionado ought. But given my druthers, I trend towards quality and I trend towards unadulterated.

And so I confronted myself recently with the fact that I don’t drink my coffee black. Milk and Sugar, sometimes even a double-double. This, I realized, flies in the face of my whole aforementioned way of doing things. So as of about a week ago, it’s been straight black coffee.  Yes, purely in the name of aesthetic synchrony.

It wasn’t easy at first. Turns out those adulterants do a pretty good job of making bad coffee more drinkable, and bad coffee abounds. But I’m here to tell you that it takes less than a week for your tongue to form the appropriate calluses, and now I’m starting to really feel it. I expect that, like wine, my brain will start to assign more neurons to coffee tasting in the coming months, and that the experience will grow on me. As it happens, I got a half pound of Kona for Christmas (thanks Barb!) and while it’s not Jamaican Blue or (I can only imagine) Kopi Luwak, I’m looking forward to tasting it without blinders.

Yes, I realise how ridiculous this all sounds.

Although I can enter droughts that last for months at a time, I am, in general, a reader. At the end of 2006 I checked my PalmPilot’s list of books read in 2006 and it turned out there were 25. This is not a particularly impressive number, but it is clearly fodder for a blog post of some kind. I thought about writing a separate post for each, basically a book review a week or so — I could stretch the content until June that way.

Problem is, I don’t really care about stretching content, and that sounds like a lot of work. Besides, I suspect that some of those reviews would be pretty thin since the books either left no mark, or left a mark which has faded over the intervening months. So instead I’ve done the potentially more useful thing and just compiled them into a coarsely ranked list, because what would the internet be without lists?

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