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.