Well right now my wife is making homemade preserves, and then canning them … I’m not sure who this person is, but I do recognize her in that pair of Levi’s …

Mixology: well I am an old timer, so whenever I here that word, I think of cocktails. Then again, I often think of cocktails. Do you know that one of the oldest known cocktails was first concocted in New Orleans in the 1850’s? Called a Sazerac, it mixes Cognac with bitters. Just useless information I  picked up along the way, back when I ran a
speakeasy in the old country.

So I was thinking that many adult beverages would benefit by a soundtrack, the right
soundtrack. Humankind’s millenniums-long fascination with booze and music (they go hand in hand) is in many respects the zenith of civilization. I bet early humans invented some kind of alcohol long before they discovered fire or invented the wheel or prostitution or god. Perhaps music existed before the advent of booze. I’m not sure. But then came club owners, and it’s been down hill ever since.

It is a widely acknowledged thought that I am a man who enjoys his Irish and Scotch Whiskey. As sinful as it sounds, I often like my whiskey with a couple cubes of ice, and sometimes I even enjoy a whiskey with a splash of seltzer, like my man Sinatra.

Here we go, today’s taste:  Jameson Irish Whiskey. The back of the bottle reads, “John Jameson founded his whiskey distillery in Dublin in the year 1780.  All the craft of the centuries-old tradition of making Irish whiskey is used to produce ‘Jameson.’ From the rich countryside of Ireland comes nature’s finest barley and crystal clear water. These natural ingredients are carefully distilled 3 times, and slowly matured for long years in oak casks to create the natural smooth whiskey that is Jameson.”

Felix the Cat isn’t just a silent film star and  animation's first superstar, or a 1950’s TV phenomenon, or the logo for a Los Angeles Chevrolet dealership, (opened by Winslow B. Felix in 1921), with its benevolent, three-sided neon sign looming over the Harbor Freeway, or the doll aviator Charles Lindbergh took with him on his historic flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927, or the mascot for the U.S. Navy's Bombing Squadron Two during WW2, or the image on tabs of LSD in the mid seventies, he's:

Felix the Cat,
The wonderful, wonderful cat!
Whenever he gets in a fix,
He reaches into his bag of tricks!

Felix the Cat,
The wonderful, wonderful cat!
You'll laugh so much
Your sides will ache
Your heart will go pitter pat
Watching Felix,
The wonderful cat.

“The amateur is the kind of a guy who draws a 9 to 5 line around his job … makes his own little box that he never gets out of … the professional doesn’t put on his cloak of excellence only at certain times … he wears it all the time”  -  Dr. G. Herbert True

“Over 2500 power-packed visual-verbal extravaganzas with slides, magic, music and wit.”

A self help seven inch record! On Idea Records (1966), and if this doesn’t help enough, you can always look for his full length album, “Are You A Prisoner?”

Last Thursday night I watched the second episode of Mad Men -- the engaging and very stylish new TV drama on (of all places) AMC about the business and home/family lives of young, upwardly mobile American ad men in the very beginning of the sixties. The show, which was created by former Sopranos * writer//producer Matthew Weiner, perfectly nails the whole style and feel of that era in American history when things were radically different from today, both socially and culturally. It was a time when everyone seemed to smoke cigarettes, often chain-smoke, and also happily knocked back cocktails during as well as after work every day. And did it sans any guilt or conscience whatsoever. Different times indeed!

As the show reminds us, it was time when people weren't all caught up in safety issues. A different time for sure when one didn't fuss with such silly distractions as putting on seat belts while driving. As last week's episode showed, neither mom nor her kids in the back of the car had seat belts on when she had a little crash. And speaking of mom, this was before the idea of women's rights was a common concept across America. Men were cads, or at least could act that way towards women. (Although you can tell in this well written script that their dominant ways will not go unchallenged by all women for too long.) As well as getting away with being cads, men also got all the good jobs. Women, it seems, were either wives who stayed home or else single women who became secretaries in offices like the Madison Avenue one in Mad Men where they're likely to be subjected to harassement -- except this was eons before the concept of sexual harassment really existed.