Liveblogging Super Tuesday

It's a frosty February evening, and we're gathered here for the first great sporting event of 2008 - Super Tuesday, live from the USA.

So far... Mike Huckabee's won in West Virginia, much to the relief of fundie Walker: Texas Ranger fans everywhere. Elsewhere, Obama looks like taking Georgia in his never-ending battle for a stalemate with Hillary.

Elsewhere...

Cyman: Don't forget Ron Paul's policy that we're all descended from a guy who fucked his own rib.
warrenellis: Why are people still talking about Ron Paul?
Cyman: Haha. Point.
Whitechapel

Walnuts? Wonkette reminds us of key points of John McCain's campaign.
(00.45)

What was that thing about a "good day to bury bad news"?
(00.51)

Matt Frei has just compared the "poetry of Obama to the hard prose of Clinton" on News 24. I think he just called her a Cylon...
(01.05)

ABC News is projecting an Obama win in Illinois, to the surprise of no-one with eyes, with McCain taking New Jersey and Conneticut. (Source, 01:04)

Results - Clinton projected to win Oklahoma for the Dems, McCain for Illinois, Romney for Massachusetts.
(01:20)

Whitechapel is providing the goodness. (01:25)

Orwellseyes: [WGN] reporting that the storms in arkansas knocked out power to Huckabee headquarters. God is apparently not happy.

Officially renaming this post "Liveblogging Whitechapel's Super Tuesday Thread. (02:45)

tikistitch McCain is starting to look kind of inevitable. Interesting that this doesn't come 'til he's 8,467 years old. I wonder if he'll be our first president who's a head in a jar.

FyreBryhte: Better than his head in an ass. I mean his ass. Oh never mind. It was funnier in my mind.

Cyman: McCain would be the oldest president ever; but his mother is still kicking at 95, and he seems fine healthwise. I can't see why his age would be an issue for 4 years. His insanity, though... another story.

What does he do with all that rage? I imagine that the lasting image 90% of people have of Howard Dean is of his infamous scream speech in 04, so when I see him talking all monotone and unshouty I can't help wondering if he has to kick a kitten on his way home. (02:56)

Genuinely Terrifying Thought, courtesy of a Romney supporter who told the BBC's correspondent in Boston that if Mittens didn't get the GOP nod, she'd have to vote for Hillary. Ringing endorsement, that. (03:09)

Genuinely Terrifying Thought #2 - Mike Huckabee needs three microphones? (03:10)

Political speechwriters aren't WGA-affiliated, are they? Huckabee's at the microphone, and he was doing so well up until he mentioned the Second Amendment and...didn't really have a point to go with it. He's ended up quoting what I assume are college football chants. Which is why you should stick to the autocue. (03:15)

Genuinely Terrifying Thought #3 He may have been sticking to the autocue. (03:16)

Sweet creeping Jesus - if Romney wasn't in trouble before, he bloody well is now. His son's incredibly confused expression during the whole values/large military/RONALD REAGAN/America will become a second-tier power meander was surpassed only by that of his wife. Mittens! Mittens! Mittens!

Also noting that clearly "private sector" is a crowd buzzword up in Boston tonight, "wonderful military" not so much. (03:40)

Sam Seaborne? - Barry's got some awesome speechwriters hidden somewhere.

Full of win

PlayTV could totally be the PS3's killer app.

If only he had a voice. Well, pen. And some paper.

Dear Dr. Breen,

I am writing to you to complain about my recent trip to City 17. I had been led to believe that the city is the closest thing there is to a capital city these days, but I must inform you that what I encountered fell severely short of my expectations.

Given the general demeanour of the citizen, I can only assume that you have been contacted regarding the somewhat strident approach to security by many of your staff. I must give praise to one Officer Calhoun who made the time to assist someone who was clearly not a local when my other requests for assistance were met with derision and, more often than not, gunfire. Even my attempts at a leisurely boating excursion were hampered not only by your employees excitable trigger-fingers but also artillery fire and air attack support.

I would also like to draw your attention to the frankly appalling levels of civic cleanliness around the streets of City 17. I could not turn a corner without being confronted by headcrabs, zombies or next-to-impassable toxic waste. And that is without even mentioning the barnacles.

Don't even get me started on the barnacles.

All in all, I am bitterly disappointed with the experience I had in City 17. I plan to spend the next leg of my vacation in Ravenholm and I do not intend to return to City 17. If I do, you may expect to feel the full force of my disappointment.

Yours,

Dr. Gordon Freeman.

PS: Good luck with the new bosses, Wallace!

Flickrdump: Another day at the office

I'm not 100% sure I actually took these pictures. Funny story, that.

It's like a cheap knock-off of Out Of Africa. Or is that Salvador?

You, the largely hypothetical reader of this weblog, may recall my recent attempts to procure a bottle of Bacardi-produced Havana Club rum while in the States. Thanks to the wonderful guys at Bramble, I finally got to taste the elusive spirit in the UK.



It's quite nasty. One of the other bartenders present said it smelled of "something someone who's not very good at cooking has burnt". One of our hosts - who has some Cuban heritage - couldn't get beyond gestures to illustrate her distaste.

The Bacardi-produced Havana Club isn't on sale in the UK. Thankfully.

New Year's End: 07 Edition

New Year's End is something I've done in my head every year. It's a collection of things that stood out for me in the past year, though not necessarily things that were created or released in that year. This year, it is also staggeringly limited given that I've genuinely been living in work.

Videogame characters I actually cared about in Uncharted
Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy
Wayne Curtis' And A Bottle of Rum: a history of the New World in ten cocktails
The first chapter of Don DeLilo's Underworld
Chuck Klosterman
The West Wing DVD marathons
Assassin's Creed's free-running mechanic
Getting caught in a nuclear explosion in Call of Duty 4
Rock, Paper, Shotgun, even though I don't do PC gaming
Vanilla & Passionfruit Cosmopolitans (thanks SJ)
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End in HD
TF2's sentry guns
And, of course, Weighted Companion Cube

Update: the hangover

There's always a problem with working in a bar over Christmas - everybody else in the whole world is on holiday, and wants to get drunk. This, fairly obviously, leads to a large number of broken bartenders and waiters come January whose employers in our specific case reward by giving them an effectively free bar for a night.

I woke up at 5 o'clock. At night. And thought it was the morning. Yesterday.

I = triumph

There was a disappointing lack of a drum roll. There were no masses waiting in hushed anticipation. There was no post-final interview with Ant and Dec, no follow ups on the talk show circuit and, crushingly, no thumbs up from Chuck Norris*. But all of these things are but follies, because I - living the work + no play = dull boy dream - have managed to complete a videogame for the first time in actual years.

Hey, Call of Duty 4! Not looking so tough now, are ya?

It's not been through lack of trying - I would have completed Halo if my iBook didn't start having seizures whenever more than, say, two enemies appeared on screen. KotOR would be in the books if the aforementioned iBook hadn't literally screamed when an entirely superfluous flying whale appeared on the Jedi Academy planet.

It's at that point that I realised that a three year-old iBook G4 probably wasn't the best choice as a gaming platform.

There are, of course, others.New Super Mario Brothers remains unfinished because I suck at Mario games, Phantom Hourglass would be seeing progress during my commute, if I didn't walk to work, Heavenly Sword would be done if there was actually a game I wanted to play in between the cutscenes.

So I managed to find the time, over the past week or so, to complete COD4's singleplayer (stop laughing at the back). It took me a while to reacquaint myself with a console FPS - after playing a lot of Fifa 08 and Okami and not a lot inbetween - but soon enough I was pop'n'shooting with the best of them. At which point I got executed.

And then killed in a nuclear explosion.

This was after completing the missions. What happens if you fail? You die? Where's my damn carrot?

What was genuinely weird about the experience was the vague guilt I felt when storming ahead of the rest of my squad into room full of enemies, even if it was what I was supposed to do. That, and spending three quarters of the game being called Soap by my CO.

But now it's over, and I am full of win. Just not online - I am truly horrific at multiplayer...

* What is it Mike Huckabee has that I don't, exactly?

NYC 07: The desperate* search for Havana Club

* Not so much desperate. More half-assed.

The history of Cuban rum is a long, impressive, convulated thing. This being the internet, though, I give you the long story short: Castro nationalizes rum production in Cuba; the Bacardi family leg it to Puerto Rico while Havana Club starts producing rum using the old Bacardi stills and facilities. Of couse, the US trade embargo on Cuba means that Havana Club is not available on American soil, so Bacardi took the opportunity to launch their very own Havana Club.

Following this ok?

The Bacardi Havana Club is not available in the UK, primarily because the Cuban Havana Club is, so I thought I'd make use of the couple of days I had in New York to find a bottle, just to see what it was like. After an exhaustive (again, nearer "when I didn't forget when passing one," than "exhaustive") search of Manhattan's liquor stores I had to admit defeat, safe in the knowledge that I had one last shot - duty free.

Or not. Guess I could pick up a litre bottle of Bacardi Limon, though. Or, in the country that's producing some of the more interesting gins on the global market, a bottle of Tanqueray Rangpur. I guess I'll have to settle for hoping that the Bacardi Havana Club tastes better that rum-flavoured vodka rather than knowing.

NYC 07

You should love New York. Every souvenir shop pushes one particular message: I (heart) NY, and when they say "I" they mean "you".

Therefore, you love New York.

They say it so much it must be true. In fact, everywhere you go in the city you get the reinforced message that this is The Greatest City In The World. The stores have the greatest deals, the restaurants have the greatest food, so on.

Whatever happened to "show, don't tell"?

I have to confess that I haven't had too many awe-inspiring moments over the past few days in New York. There are impressive things here, to be sure. There is a little rush of excitement the first time you see the Empire State Building towering above 5th Avenue, likewise the Brooklyn Bridge and Liberty Island in the distance. Times Square is remarkable in its neon tackiness. But these uniquely impressive spots are undermined by the ordinariness of the spaces between.

The overall effect is similar to looking at a Seurat painting - the closer you get, the less cohesive the whole appears. You start to see the disparate individual elements that make up the whole, and sat next to each other in close proximity they don't seem that impressive. Like Seurat's La Grande Jatte you marvel at the beauty of it from afar and at the achievement of creating that beauty from up close. The real New York is not just the New York of popular culture. It is both less than and more than that.

Getting touchy

I'm writing this on an iPod Touch for no reason other than that I can. It's a lovely device, but right now I can't see it as much more than a gadget. It isn't too useful to me outside of a wireless network except as a music player but as far as that goes, it's ticking almost all the right boxes. That said, you can really feel the potential of the hardware. This device is calling out for a port of the classic Lucasarts point-and-click games (Monkey Island et al) and some quality, native (not online, thanks) applications.

Muhahahaha. I have a desk now. So to work.

War Stories: Nor any drop to drink

Thursday afternoon, and someone has decided that the thing to do - right now - is dig a big hole in the floor beside the main bar. What's more, they've decided that once you've started going down there's only one way to go, and cut a water main in the process.

So, while four workmen and five bar staff try to stop the main floor flooding with mops, cardboard boxes and towels, one lucky guy gets to turn off the water supply to the building. Thing is, when you turn of the mains water supply, the sprinkler system sets off the fire alarm. Because the fire alarm has gone off - and this is not, funnily enough, a drill - we have to evacuate the building and wait for the fire brigade to arrive and check the building.

It all goes rather well, all things considered. The fire brigade have a look around, and they're pretty happy that nothing's on fire. So we start letting customers back in to the upstairs bar which is at least dry. On the downside, we still have one bar under an inch of water and no running water anywhere. All of this means we have no draught beers or mixer, and sooner or later the ice machines are going to start complaining. Because the water is off and the sprinkler system has triggered the fire alarm, the gas has shut off automatically and we have no food available, and a table of 25 booked in right about now.

Two and a half hours of bailing water later, we get the bar dry, the pipes fixed, the water back on and we reopen the main bar. Five hours after it all started, we've done four days work and we've still got a hole in the floor.

Spectacular.

War Stories: Fifteen minutes

Really, I'm not going to lie to you. I can't fight. Not in the fisticuffs sense of the word, or at least not well. But tonight - which up to a point had been pretty good, really quiet and on course for cleaning up and home within fifteen minutes of closing - was touch and go for a moment. I served a group of out-of-towners a couple of minutes before we shut the bar. Twenty minutes later they were moaning about having to rush their drinks (we give customers fifteen minutes grace to finish their drinks we close), so we get the manager out and he tells them it's over. Go home. And so it goes for a couple of minutes, we just want them to go so we can go home.

And then someone says something, someone hears something and all of a sudden there's standing up and shoulders being squared and just for a second there's the manager, me and one other guy on the bar and there's four older, slightly drunk but pretty hefty dudes and...

It's over. No drama. Well, no more drama. They shift out, grumbling about the level of customer care , and we all take a deep breath and thank whatever it is we pray to because we don't get paid enough to get hit because someone can't finish a pint in fifteen minutes.

Viva Glasvegas!: Shiny

Viva Glasvegas! celebrates Scotland's own East Coast/West Coast beef, one that's mainly lacking hip hop, violent death and, hell, much of the rivalry

There's an Apple Store opening near me (I say near; it's in Glasgow which is roughly the same distance from Edinburgh as any point of civilisation on the continental United States is from utter fucking wilderness). This is not a good thing, unless you happen to work at said Apple Store and get paid commission on every overdrawn geek you entrap.

Simple, really: stay out of Glasgow, stay out of debtor's prison.

Hurricane Dean

There's a lot of people in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico who won't be making this mistake right now, but everytime I see a reference to Hurricane Dean in the press, I just can't not think of dear ol' Howard.

Clearly there's a demographic that the mineral water industry doesn't cater for: alcoholics. Thankfully, the brains at Diageo are going to fill that void with shiny new Smirnoff Source - "the new premium malt beverage offering...that combines pure spring water with alcohol."

Lovely.

United States of England: There's really no point, is there?

At some point between the apocalyptic thunderstorms that have been lashing Auld Reekie, this year's Edinburgh International Festival Fringe officially kicked off, bringing exciting and diverse entertainments from around the world to our sleep little corner of Scotland. Also, Jimmy Carr.

Let's not forget the most important people in all this: London's Britain's cultural intelligensia who have decamped north en masse to sample pints of ale in Rebus' local, soak up the atmosphere in the world's first City of Literature and get in the way of the locals. The annual occupation more or less renders any coverage we'd be offering on the festival season irrelevant, except for those occasions when lame punning and excessive sarcasm are required, so we're just not going to bother.

A couple of hints, though, for the festival rookie - Spiegeltent is so 2005, all of the good parties are flat parties and you're not invited, and, whatever you do, don't heckle Daniel Kitson.

If you need us, we'll be in the Assembly Rooms Lane Bar.

I'd love to know how you fit that in a fax machine

The Fruitmarket Gallery is hosting an exhibition by Alex Hartley. To celebrate, it appears that they've faxed themselves an annotated version of the building.

The Essential Collection: say what?

I may have mentioned that we've just launched a new cocktail menu at Le Monde, but it's always worth throwing out there. However while the list is pretty big, it can't cover all bases, particularly with regards to classic cocktails. Bearing that in mind, we're getting together a list of all the "essential" classics that aren't on the menu with the intention of tweaking recipes to fit the products we have in stock and getting them put on our tills. All of this, though, begs the question of which cocktails can be considered "essential"?

It can't purely be a question of age. We classified the Margarita as a classic for the menu, even though it doesn't have much heritage before the middle part of the twentieth century, whereas a Martinez* - mentioned by Jerry Thomas in his 1882 bartender's guide, and the forefather of modern Martini - is undeniably a classic cocktail, but given its popularity it is hardly an essential drink for the modern bartender to know.

I foresee a rush on dudes ordering Martinezes (Martinii?) on a Saturday night, just to shut me up.

So, the question remains. Of course, lots of the old school drinks that we couldn't put on the menu will be looked at; the Old Fashioned, the Sazerac, for example, and we'll be taking a long, hard look at the Tiki legacy; the Zombie, the Mai Tai, so on. Clearly we're also going to have to include some drinks from the dark ages of the mid-late 80s - there'll have to be a Sex On The Beach, maybe even the Alabama Slammer (damn you Cruise, damn you) - on the grounds that we will get asked to make them.

I don't have an answer yet. Surely it will lie in the middle ground between history, popularity and quality. I think I'm going to enjoy getting there more than arriving.

* Just in case I do get that rush...

Martinez Cocktail (Jerry Thomas' recipe)
(Use small bar-glass.)
Take 1 dash of Boker's bitters.
2 dashes of Maraschino.
1 pony of Old Tom gin.
1 wine glass of Vermouth.
2 small lumps of ice.

Martinez (Simon Difford's recipe)
2 shots Plymouth Gin
½ shot Cinzano Rosso vermouth
¼ shot Cointreau
¼ shot Gomme syrup
3 dashes Orange bitters (optional)

Shake all ingredients with ice and fine-strain into chilled martini glass. Garnish with a twist of orange zest.