I don't have to be hit over the head with a 2x4 more than a few times to get a point

So, back in November, I mentioned how it had been a long time since my last post. Then I don't post anything for another five months.

I like the idea of blogging in the abstract, but it is becoming apparent to me that I don't really have a burning need to share what I think with the anonymous world at large. I know a few of you read this and I appreciate you comments, but I think to be effective a blog has to be updated pretty regularly and I don't seem to have the drive to do that. It's not that I don't think profound thoughts or see or hear about things worthy of commenting; it just seems that for some reason I'm not driven to write about it. One thing I hear about writers is that they HAVE to write. Just having the skills is only half the package when it comes to being a writer. And blogging is writing, albeit not at the Great American Novel level.

Also, I think that maybe "whatever's going on in my mind" is not sufficiently focused for an effective blog. I'm thinking of starting a new blog that will be just about music---I follow a number of music-related forums and I see certain issues come up fairly often, regarding which I have thought a lot: I think I may have more to say. And, then, when I am inspired to type out some long response to a music forum post, I can copy and tweak that: instant blog post!

I may yet post more in this blog, but I'm leaning towards declaring victory and packing it up. If you've been follwing it for the past couple years, thanks!

Catching Up

Well, this may be my longest interval between posts---life seems to have been really busy lately. And, while those of you who know me know that I have pretty definite opinions on a lot of stuff, I don't always feel a need to vent them, and, I tend to not want to get negative in this blog. (I figure nothing good can come from complaining publicly about things and, especially, people.)

But even so, a lot has been going on, so here are some thoughts about stuff that's happened lately:

The Year of Roller Derby

2009 will go down in my personal history as the Year of Roller Derby. (Or maybe the First Year of Roller Derby.) Over the course of this year, I went from being mildly interested in derby to being a hard-core superfan of the sport. I followed the Windy City Rollers' for an exciting home season, culminating with an edge-of-the-seat hard-fought bout for the Ivy King Cup in which the worst-to-first Manic Attackers came from behind to win their first cup. In the course of that, I got to "coach" a team as described in my earlier post, and I met a lot of interesting people. Then, the All-Stars became the focus heading into tournament season, and I ended up going to Minneapolis for the North Central regional tournament, which was a blast (and which, coincidentally, Windy City won). I also checked out Chicago's other derby league, the Chicago Outfit. We're lucky to have two leagues in town.

The league on the whole is going to be very different next year---a lot of skaters, including some very prominent ones, are retiring. I'm really going to miss Malice with Chains and Megan Formor, who were always riveting to watch, but more importantly were strong leaders and key parts of the league chemistry. I think I commented earlier about derby skaters having a professional half-life of about three or four years... They both are four-year skaters who are leaving at the top of their game. I can't blame anybody who after four years has had enough of an activity as physicially punishing and time-consuming as derby. Despite its growing popularity, it's still an amateur sport; there's no money in it for the players (indeed, they pay to skate). But, it's sad that these truly great players who clearly still have plenty to offer, leaving. And that's just in our league; one wonders how many other great skaters can't or don't keep up with the grind. I don't know a whole lot about other leagues but even I know of some great skaters who are out of it.

The national tournament this year was a real eye-opener---the West division surprised just about everyone by coming in and running roughshod over the rest of the country. Because of the distances involved and the associated cost of traveling to bouts, teams from the rest of the country didn't play that many bouts against the West teams, so although the stats told how well they did against each other, it was not that easy to tell what that meant compared to teams from other regions. And to be honest, the derby community was (until the weekend of November 13-15, anyway) pretty east-centric. Philadelphia, Gotham, Windy City and Texas were the dominant teams east of the Rockies, and even though the team from Olympia, Washington, beat all comers all year, I don't think anybody really thought that they were in that league. Well, come the tournament, everybody got a bucket-of-icewater-in-the-face wake-up as not just Oly but also the other two teams from the West (Denver and Rocky Mountain, also from Denver) handily trounced the big teams from the east: Denver beat Windy City; Rocky Mountain beat Philly; and Oly beat Gotham, and none of those bouts was really a nail-biter, either. Oly ended up winning the whole shebang. Texas did beat Rocky Mountain in the semi-finals to prevent a Western sweep of the tournament. Denver did employ some controversial (legal but despised) tactics in several of their victories, which might be prohibited in subsequent rules revisions, but I don't think anybody could deny that Oly just out-skated and out-played everybody else. So, the bar has been raised. The non-west teams are now on notice that they're not as good as they thought they were. This makes the loss of Megan and Malice right now all the more painful, since Windy City is going to have to step up their play to regain their position at the top of the rankings list, and it will be just that much more difficult without two of their best defensive players.

Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to next season. The local league season in particular should be quite fun. My friend Kelly's team, the Fury, should have a much better season this coming year---although they are losing one of the league's top jammers with the retirement of Eva Dead, their team on the whole appears to be emerging from this round of departures relatively strong, and I think they'll be right in the thick of things. And, this year saw the organization of a second "travel team", which Kelly is on, so that will bring more other teams to town. Can't complain about more derby!

It appears that somebody is trying to put a men's derby league together in Chicago. Although I love to skate, and love to watch derby, I haven't really been fired up to actually play derby, thus far anyway. That may in part be due to my current "fat and out of shape" status. But if they have some sort of organizational skate I might check it out. I played town-league ice hockey for two years while I was in law school, and that was the best shape I was ever in in my life, so maybe a skating sport is what I need to get fit again. As long as I don't destroy my knees getting there.

Music News

The big news: I joined a new band, an 80s alternative cover band called Dec8de. It's pretty close to exactly the kind of music I like to play, so I'm pretty pleased. Our public debut is the day after Christmas at the Dark Room in Chicago. I'm playing bass, which is my main instrument, and it's nice to be back on bass again---it's been about a year since the Bill Tucker project faded away. The other guys in this band seem to know what they're doing. Hopefully it will be commercially viable!

The Xylenes are still going, but we've decided we're going to change our focus to play originals. That means we have to WRITE original songs. I've got a few ideas I've accumulated, but I really hope some of the other Xylenes reveal themselves to be nascent songwriters. Thus far, the Xylenes have been sort of an educational program, but we're coming up on the four-year anniversary of the forming of that group, and by this point I think it should either be a real band, or if not, I'm not interested in putting a bunch of time and effort into it. Up until this year, our M.O. was to learn a set of tunes and then play what was essentially a showcase for our friends and relatives. This year we've tried to be a "real" cover band, but it doesn't seem like the other Xylenes (or at least, not all of them) really want to do that. So we're going to try the original music route. It could be interesting, if nothing else.

A Great Read

I want to put in a plug for a great book: The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe. They wrote a book called Generations a while ago in which they posit a historical cycle in American history, and in this new book they employ the theory from the first book to predict things that may happen in the next couple decades. When I read Generations, it was like a long string of "lightbulb" moments---lots of "Oh, I see, that explains it!" experiences. So I'm inclined to give their predictions a lot of credence. If nothing else it is very thought-provoking. They wrote The Fourth Turning about ten years ago, and events between then and now have generally followed the patterns they predicted. If you want at least a pretty good theory on why society has gotten to the point it has and where it's going to go from here, these guys have one.

New Whiskey Discovery

I'm interested in whiskey. I like to drink it sometimes, but more than that I'm fascinated by how it's made and all the variables that go into making a bottle of even the most mundane Bourbon. I'm particularly interested when someone makes whiskey that's different from the "usual suspects". Whiskey is a very tradition-driven field, and it takes chutzpah to try something new. Or even something old that's not the same kind of thing everyone else is making. The parameters of what can be whiskey are very broad, but due to tradition almost all whiskey falls into a few fairly narrow categories. Even within a category like Bourbon, there is really very little variation among the major distillers. The fact that they nevertheless produce a fairly wide range of products just shows how much room there is under the whiskey umbrella, and hints at all the other things there could be.

If you read the federal regulations regarding whiskey, you'll notice that there are categories listed that don't appear to have many if any existing examples. One such is corn whiskey. Corn whiskey (as opposed to Bourbon, which is also made from mostly corn) is not required to be aged and contains a very high percentage of corn in the mashbill. Corn whiskey is similar to the whiskey that was made in the pre-Prohibition, pre-industrial days by people who ran small stills for their own or very local consumption. It's often called moonshine, even by the people who make it now, but I think that carries with it some unfair negative connotations. Contrary to what that label might suggest, it's possible to make good corn whiskey, if you know what you're doing, and for generations it was made on farms and in the Appalachian hollers, until Prohibition transformed illicit liquor production into big business and ensured a focus on quantity over quality (and indeed over toxicity).

For a long time, the only corn whiskey that could be commonly found was a product called Georgia Moon, which came in a canning jar and was sold as a novelty. It was an ordeal drink, something you'd give to buddies prefaced with, "Hey try this! It's moonshine!" and they would hack and cough at its rough finish. It was never intended to actually be good, and because that's all you could find, I think it did (or at least, may have done) lots of harm to the reputation of corn whiskey.

But lately, a new corn whiskey has appeared in stores, called Virginia Lightning. And this stuff is actually good! I bought a bottle just out of curiosity, to see what it was like, and I was very pleasantly surprised. It's GOOD young whiskey. It reminds me a bit of the Death's Door White Whiskey that I wrote about earlier, except that that is made from wheat and this is made from corn...and you could buy about three bottles of Virginia Lightning for the costof one bottle of Death's Door. (I still like and support Death's Door, too, because I am happy to see someone making a wheat whiskey.)

I recommend Virginia Lightning to anyone who drinks spirits---not as a novelty, or because it's different, but because it's good. It's actually quite smooth for its potency, and has a good flavor. I'm very pleased by the burgeoning craft distilling movement in America in recent years, but I wouldn't recommend or support anything that wasn't fundamentally good. Virginia Lightning is. So, explore corn whiskey, a historically significant and nearly lost style. I suspect you'll be glad you did.

My thoughts about health care

Health care seems to be the big topic in the news nowadays. I will admit, I have not diligently followed the debate, and I don't know the specific contents of any of the proposals, counter-proposals, etc. that are floating around Washington. But I think I've gotten at least some of the broad brushstrokes of the debate, and inasmuch as the topic is inescapable, I have given the matter thought.

I think it's misleading to try to describe health care as a "right", since somebody else has to provide it, but I do think that ensuring that decent health care is generally available to people is a legitimate, even laudable, function for government. I perceive, however, that there is tension between those who want the government to actually provide the health care, and those who want a free health care market. It's often described as a battle between socialism and capitalism.

But I think that sort of misses the point. Years ago, when nobody was looking, that decision was already made.

Let's think about insurance a bit, since that seems to be how health care is delivered now and how one side of the debate thinks it should continue to be delivered. Insurance---health, fire, liability, etc.---is, at heart, gambling. An insurance company bets, based on its research and the work of its actuarial staff, on the likelihood of an event occurring. The potential downside times the likelihood of occurrence generates a number which, with a margin tacked on for profit, is used to determine the cost of the insurance policy. Over the long run and multiple policies, the insurance company hopes that it figures right, and it ends up taking in more than it pays out. The insured for his or her part pays part of the cost of an eventuality which may never occur, in exchange for the peace of mind that comes from knowing that if it does occur, they will not have to pay the full cost. Everybody, theoretically, is happy.

However, there arise situations in which the likelihood of the insured-against event occurring approaches 100%. A classic example is the need for medical treatment when the patient has a pre-existing chronic condition. In that case, the logical course for the insurer is to deny coverage: not to play the game; not to take the sucker bet. Or, alternatively, the premium would be equal to the cost of treatment (plus profit). That's not evil, or greed, or any other malicious trait---it's logic.

But, when it comes to health care, We (as in, society) are not willing to accept that. It's too gut-wrenching to see some poor old lady with cancer who loses her job being denied the treatment she needs to stay alive. Given the premises that (a) everybody should have health care, and (b) health care is paid for by insurance, the conclusion is that everybody should have insurance. But in that case, what you're talking about is no longer insurance. Insurance is the gamble described above. In this new situation, what ends up happening is, everybody pays in, and then out of what everybody pays in, everybody gets their health care paid.

Know what another name for that system is? Socialized medicine. I mean, what's the difference? The mechanism is ridiculously simple: everybody pays in; everybody gets treatment if they need it. The cost of treatment is spread out over the entire society. If that's not socialized medicine, what is it?

So, ever since the first law was passed regulating when and whether insurance companies could deny coverage, we have been operating under a system of socialized medicine. The situation reminds me of an old off-color joke:

A knavish man meets an attractive woman at a party. He asks her, "Will you have sex with me?"

"Not bloody likely," she replies with disdain.

"How about for a million dollars?"

She thinks about it, and finally says, "Yes, I suppose for a million dollars, I'd have sex even with you."

"I don't have a million. How about for ten bucks?"

"Of course not!" she huffs indignantly. "What sort of girl do you take me for?"

"We've already established what kind of girl you are," he replies. "Now we're just arguing over price."

That, I think, is analogous to the current debate about health care. There seems to be a lot of huffing and puffing from people who are afraid that American health care, and perhaps society on the whole, will head off to hell in a handbasket if we adopt any form of socialized medicine, but the funny/ironic/pathetic thing is, we've already decided we want socialized medicine. We've had it, in an impure and inefficient form, for years! That horse is out of the barn; that water has passed under the bridge. That question has been decided; now we're just arguing about the details.

The switch to socialized medicine, which took place years ago, was not immediately apparent, however, because the insurance companies remained in place, and often in the current debate it seems that insurance companies represent the opposite of socialized medicine.

But I think the REAL role insurance companies play is, they interject a middleman with a profit motive into the mechanism of providing the socialized health care, which the public demands, to the public. So you end up with high costs and fights over coverage, and parades of horribles due to people being denied coverage or dropped for pretextual reasons. Everybody feels that things like that shouldn't be happening, but the reason they do is because the square pegs of insurance companies have been shoved into the round holes of socialized health care, and obviously the fit is not good.

One cannot really blame the insurance companies, who have been paid billions of dollars to play the role they currently play, for wanting to preserve the status quo. It is in the nature of corporations, especially big corporations, to mercilessly protect their profits and maximize their income and value. But I think that if people looked at the situation clearly, it's obvious that the insurance companies need to be taken out of the loop. In fact, I am sure that if the whole system was being conceived from ground zero without decades of history and having arrived at the current situation by little steps, I think anybody who tried to do what we have now---arrange things so that huge amounts of money were funneled to private actors to perform a public function, and not even very well---I have to think that guy would go to prison for it, and there would be riots in the streets if Congress tried to enforce a system like we have on people, if they weren't already used to it.

One likes to feel good about one's country, and it is disillusioning to see the extent to which big business, both in the health care field and the financial arena, has taken over our government, to the extent that so many public servants are willing and even eager to work against the best interests of the public for the benefit of private entities. But I don't know what can be done about it, if even in the wake of last fall's financial meltdown, which could have destroyed our economy, there is not the will and/or ability to reform that industry, and even though I get the feeling that most Americans feel that there is something wrong with the health care system, Congress can't/won't do anything about it, despite the best opportunity that may come for a generation to actually make a "change we can believe in".

People have surprised me in the past; I live in hope. But I don't hold my breath.

So you wanna be a roller derby star, part II

The Dark Side: front: Queen Myradala (Myra Maines), Darth Mel (Mel Content), Darth Tater (Norma Lee Wright), Indy Sith (Indy Cent), Nina Millimeter. Back: Yvette YourMaker, Sargentina, Sonya MouthShut, Chuck Yeah!!!, Go-Go Hatchet, Sassy Squash, Anne Akin (Anne Arkie), Carnage Wilson (bench coach), Tori Adore.

Well, the bout was Saturday. It was a blast, I got to dress up as Darth Vader, I really liked the gals on the team, and it was very educational. Unfortunately, my theory proved wrong, or at least incomplete. We were outscored pretty significantly, which caused me to revise my view: I still think that a strong defensive team can shut down a good jammer, but, what I failed to take into account is, a good jammer is an individual, and a strong defense is a group that has to work together and all be on the same page strategically, so having a total of zero full-team practices pretty much precluded my defensive powerhouse of skaters from two different teams becoming a well-oiled machine by the time of the bout.

A friend of mine is working on a board game version of roller derby to be played with dice, and I've been thinking about the mechanics of the game. Something that may be unique to roller derby versus other sports is that both teams are playing offense and defense simultaneously. In most sports, there's a clear demarcation as to what role the players have at any given time---even if it may change often based on one team stealing the ball or puck from the other, at any given moment, the players are either on offense or defense. But in roller derby, any player can be doing either (or both) at any moment. It makes strategy a real challenge. I didn't have much opportunity to really talk strategy with the skaters but I'm hoping to do so in the future.

Now that the local league season is over, the All Stars take center stage. The Windy City Rollers are a league, and have multiple teams that play each other, but they also have a "travel team" made of the best players from all the local teams, and that team takes on the travel teams of other leagues around the country. The schedule has not been set yet but they will play a number of bouts over the remainder of the year, culminating with the national tournament in November.

This year brings a new twist. The All Stars are one of the top teams in the country, and are competitive with the best other leagues from major metropolitan areas. But there are a number of other leagues in smaller cities, or just less-established or less-accomplished, and it doesn't make sense from either perspective for the All-Stars to play those leagues' teams. Well, for the first time this season, the WCR is putting together an official second travel team, which will (a) provide an opportunity for WCR skaters to skate against teams they might not otherwise, and (b) give up-and-coming skaters experience in inter-league competition, and keep them skating competitively throughout the rest of the season.

Many of the Dark Siders, including Kelly (Mel Content) are going to be on the "B" team, so I am looking forward to their bouts. Of course I'm also looking forward to the All Stars bouts, too.

According to scuttlebutt, a number of prominent skaters will be retiring from the league after this season. Skaters seem to have a half-life in the league of about three or four years. I'm sort of amazed that skaters at the very top of their game would walk away, as seems to be happening in several cases if rumors are true, but I'm sure there are dynamics at work in the roller derby world that are unlike other sports---they are not paid, and to compete at the top level of the sport (and the really good skaters in the WCR are definitely there) places serious demands on a skater's time. Flat-track roller derby is relatively new and has changed a lot since it started (it was resurrected from the corpse of old-school banked-track roller derby in 2000, and just started in Chicago in 2004) and it's still evolving---this year is bringing a substantial revision to the rules. So perhaps the game is moving away from what brought some of the relative veterans into it. I have heard that over the first few years it became much more athletically-focused than when it started, but most of the reported retirees are excellent athletes, so I don't think that's it. I wonder if it may be a case of no more worlds left to conquer. It will be interesting to see if the next generation of skaters---the women who have been skating for just a couple years---stick with it longer, or if they start bowing out in another year or two.

In the mean time: it's been fun to be a fan, and it was fun to be a sort-of coach, and I'm eager to see what happens next. I know I'm not going to be a skater! Other than that, who knows?

So you wanna be a roller derby star...

Followers of this blog may remember this post from last year, about my friend and bandmate Kelly joining the Windy City Rollers, the local roller derby league. (Or, you can read it now.) Since then I have indeed attended a number of bouts, along the way gaining a better understanding of how the sport works, and getting to know the skaters in the league (their on-track incarnations, anyway). It's been a lot of fun.

The WCR is an all-volunteer organization: everybody from the skaters, to the officials, to the stats people and scorekeepers, to the folks who set up and take down the track, donates his or her time because they like the sport and the league. I think it would be fun and interesting to get involved somehow but this year so far has been pretty hectic and weird, and I have not been in a position to commit the time to another activity. So, I've just been a fan. (They also serve who only sit and cheer.)

But then a few weeks ago I heard about something that sounded right up my alley. At the end of the local league season, the two top teams play for the coveted Ivy King Cup. Rather than having the other teams play a meaningless consolation bout, the skaters who are not on the teams playing in the championship go into a draft pool, and the league auctions off the opportunities to coach two teams that the winners get to draft from that pool. The proceeds go to help Tequila Mockingbird, a skater who was seriously injured a couple years ago. What a great chance to get involved, on a finite basis, learn more about the game, meet some interesting people (and they are an interesting bunch) and help out a good cause! So I bid on and won the chance to coach the black team in the black-vs-white scrimmage.

I'm posting this before the bout, but I figure the odds of anybody who (a) doesn't already know and (b) would have any surprises spoiled or (c) could give any advantage to the other team seeing this are vanishingly small, so...

I drafted a pretty solid team, I think---I went with defense over offense and I hope that turns out to have been an astute plan, but the girls seem confident and in the regular season there seemed to be some sort of correlation between how well the teams did and how strong their defense was. In some cases I went with spunk and verve over prominence and experience---I drafted gals that I stood out to me during the season for being in the middle of things and mixing it up. In anything like a draft, it's easy to think woulda-shoulda-coulda but in retrospect, the more I think about it, the happier I have been with this team---in just about every situation where I think back and ponder, "Well, I could have taken Skater X instead of Skater Y," I'm pretty happy now that I have Skater Y on my team---I wouldn't want to give her up to get Skater X, and that's really what it boils down to.

So we had to come up with a team concept, and there were a few floating around, and I came up with several, but the one the gals latched onto was "The Dark Side," with a Star Wars theme. Perhaps because I told them that if we went with that one I would wear a Darth Vader costume when we came out for the bout. In any event, a number of them took that idea and ran with it. Our opponents took the name "White Zombies", which I like to say is appropriate because they are dead, and just don't know it.

I went to scrimmage on Monday and met most of the women who will be on my team, and got a little taste of what it's like on the bench during a bout, as we went up against the Manic Attackers, one of the teams playing in the championship bout. I think I can get the hang of it eventually, but fortunately one of the veteran bench coaches from the Fury will be there to help with calling line-ups---we planned out line-ups that will hopefully be balanced and get everyone into the game, but once people start getting penalties, the set line-ups go out the window, and I'm not entirely sure how to deal with the ensuing chaos.

But I like my team, I think we have a very good chance of winning, and I think we are going to have a lot of fun in any event. One thing this has made me realize is how little I really grasped about strategy etc. even though I watched every bout this year. I will certainly be a more educated spectator going forward. And I wouldn't mind helping out on a more regular basis as a volunteer, if my life calms down enough to make that practical.

I'll post an update after the bout.

Just checking in

I note that it's been a while since I posted anything. When I started this blog, I was hoping to have approximately weekly posts, then I sort of settled for approximately monthly posts, which I justified to myself by trying to write longer, "essay" sort of posts rather than "Gee the weather is great today" type posts. But on the assumption that a few people check in here from time to time, I figured I ought to put something up to remind everyone that this blog is still a going concern.

It has been pretty hectic lately. Most significantly, my father-in-law, Paulis Anstrats, died on May 21. He had been pretty sick for several months and we all knew it was coming, just not exactly when. He was a neat guy, and I will miss him. He came over from Latvia after WWII and went from being a penniless refugee to a college professor---he taught German, world literature, and western civilization at DePaul for almost 30 years, but he retired in 1990 so I never knew Dr. Anstrats the professor, but he did love literature and words, and tended to illustrate his conversation with references to books. He was a smart, clever guy, and his coversations tended to be entertaining. He and my wife, his only child, were very close. He appreciated good beer and a nice Gewurztraminer or Riesling.

He died right before the Memorial Day holiday weekend, which pushed off the funeral activities for a few days, so we had more time than usual to fret over everything. This was my first experience preparing for a wake and funeral (when my sister died, her husband and his family handled just about everything, I think---in any event, I wasn't involved). There are certain elements of the funeral process that are a total racket, but actually, to a large extent, I think it is money well spent to pay a funeral director to deal with a lot of the details. But if I see this coming regarding myself or anyone else close to me, I will seek out a deal on a casket well before it's actually needed. In general I think the funeral people who handled my father-in-law's arrangements did a great job and I would not hesitate to work with them again, but I think my mother-in-law got taken to the cleaners with the casket.

Then, on the heels of all that activity, we had two friends come to visit over the weekend. I have a lot of great friends here in town, and I'm very grateful for that, but I've also had a lot of very good friends who have moved away. So it just so happened that two of them, to whom I had issued vague standing invitations to visit, came to town at the same time, and rather than have to tell one of them that we couldn't put them up, we had them both come over. I was a little concerned but they got along fine. So from Thursday night to Sunday morning we were pretty much on the go a lot, including a group outing to the Roller Derby Saturday night, which was a good call because both bouts were fantastic---in the first bout, we saw the no-longer-hapless Manic Attackers come back from a 45 point deficit to beat the defending-champ Hell's Belles, and in the second bout, the heretofore-winless Fury ("our" team by virtue of our friend Kelly (aka Mel Content) being a member) took control early on and managed to hold on and eke out a victory in the last bout of the season, which besided being a great bout (a real nail-biter) was great to see, and I'm glad we were there.

Then a few hours after our guests left, our book club met. This month's book was Lady Chatterly's Lover by D. H. Lawrence, which unfortunately I didn't get to read because, you know, I was sort of busy. But it prompted a pretty active discussion.

Meanwhile, another one of my friends has a kid who has taken up Magic: The Gathering, a game I once was a minor master of. So I'm hoping I can go visit them some time soon. And the Xylenes are working towards another performance---we found a single weekend in July when everyone seems to be available, so I sure hope we can get a gig set up then.

Not a dull moment around my house. I'm hoping for some, but I'm not sure when that can happen.

Fun at WhiskeyFest

Last week my dad and I went to WhiskeyFest Chicago. There are two aspects to WhiskeyFest: first, there's the big room where lots of distilleries have booths at which you can sample their wares, including often rare and expensive spirits that might be impossible to find in bars and prohibitively expensive to gamble on buying a bottle of. Over the years I've kind of figured out what I like and there were largely the usual suspects present (the show this year was smaller than it had been in the past) but I still found some pretty cool stuff I hadn't tried before (Aberfeldy 21-year-old single malt Scotch, for instance) and some interesting new expressions of old favorites (Highland Park15-year-old Scotch, or Pappy Van Winkle 20 year old bourbon). The whiskey world is not really that big, and after a while one gets to recognize a number of usual suspects. The other aspect of WhiskeyFest is the speakers. This, to me, is the real attraction. Various figures of the whiskey world talk about what they're doing or aspects of whiskey production.

Dad and I caught two of them: first, we heard Craig Beam, master distiller from Heaven Hill (and part of the same family that gives Jim Beam its name) talk about extremely old bourbon. Whiskey goes through a process as it ages whereby for some period of time it gets better, but eventually it reaches a "tipping point" from which it goes downhill. Many ancient Scotches are "ooh-ed" and "aah-ed" over, at ages of 30, 40, 50 years, but conditions differ between Scotland and Kentucky, and whiskey ages a lot faster in Kentucky, resulting in it getting "too old" sooner. So bourbon distilleries don't generally plan on keeping whiskey for that long, but with dozens of rickhouses and hundreds of thousands of barrels aging, sometimes some can get "lost". Recently Heaven Hill found some barrels that had been aging away for 27 years or more.

Craig said he would not have expected the whiskey inside to be drinkable, but they tapped them and, lo and behold, it was not bad! Actually it was pretty good. So they released a limited-edition 27-year-old whiskey, which we got to sample. We compared it to Heaven Hill's regular production Elijah Craig 18-year-old bourbon---and it was good, but I don't know that it was better enough to justify paying a LOT more than the 18-year-old, which is a bargain if you like Heaven Hill's house style. But in any event, one of the points to be made was that it makes a big difference where in the warehouse the whiskey is aging. Heaven Hill's whiskey warehouses are seven stories high, and the aging effects on the upper floors are a lot more pronounced than on the lower floors---temperature swings tend to be more extreme, and the lower floors tend to be damper. The 27-year-old whiskey came from a lower floor of the warehouse. But to demonstrate the difference most dramatically, we were provided with two samples of whiskey, both aged 30 years, but one from a lower floor and one from the top floor. The sample from the lower floor was pretty good, but the sample from the top floor was undrinkable! It was easily the worst whiskey I have ever tasted. And, the most interesting factoid from that presentation was that after 30 years, evaporation will have claimed almost all the liquid in that cask---out of a 60-gallon barrel they only get a gallon or so of whiskey, and it was concentrated to something like 170 proof! Fortunately, it's so horrible that nobody would want it, so it's scarcity is hardly a problem.

So, the lesson of that presentation: older does NOT always mean better when it comes to whiskey.

The next presentation we hit was a panel discussion by a group of craft distillers. When I first got interested in whiskey about six years ago, these guys did not exist. Being a lawyer naturally I looked into the laws and regulations about distilling, and I couldn't see any reason why you couldn't run a small-scale distillery making small batches, but people told me it couldn't be done; you couldn't get licensed. It's probably just as well I didn't have the wherewithal to pursue that aspect of the hobby, but the intervening years have shown that hey, you can indeed do small-scale distilling, and a number of people are doing it. Given the need to turn work into cash quickly in a start-up business like that, most of them are making unaged spirits: vodka, gin, brandy. But some are making whiskey, and we heard from several of them on the panel.

A brief digression into the history of whiskey: up until prohibition, whiskey-making was a cottage industry in lots of rural areas in the south and east. It was technically illegal, but not vigorously opposed when it was done on a small scale. Prohibition turned what had been a craft and hobby into a deadly serious business and brought the wrath of the government down on moonshiners in a whole new way, and pretty much destroyed that tradition of whiskey-making. Prohibition meant that illicit distilling was about making as much as cheaply as possible and that is whence came the popular conception of moonshine as horrible head-splitting fire-water.

But there was a time when people made and drank young whiskey because they liked it, because it was good. A lot of the character of the whiskey you find in the stores today comes from being aged in oak barrels, but it is possible to make a very good spirit without aging. It's not the same as vodka because vodka is distilled to a very very high proof multiple times to remove as much of the flavoring elements as possible, where whiskey---even unaged whiskey---is distilled out at a lower proof, leaving more of the things that give it flavor in there. A few years ago at another WhiskeyFest, Fred Noe from Jim Beam had a bottle of "white dog", which is bourbon distillate straight out of the still, with no aging, and I got to have a taste. It was amazing! Although Bourbon is made from mostly corn, it doesn't really taste like corn. But this white dog did. It was like liquid, highly-alcoholic corn on the cob. It had a kick to it, but not in a bad way.

So I thought, as a craft distiller, I would make a young whiskey that was designed and produced to taste really good in that form. It's a legitimate form of American whiskey that's not really made today, and it would get around that pay-for-it-now-but-can't-sell-it-for-several-years conundrum that faces a startup distillery that wants to make, say, bourbon. (There are of course commercial corn whiskeys, which are unaged, but for a long time the only one readily available was Georgia Moon, which comes in a canning jar and is, I think, intended to be an "ordeal" drink---you give it to your friends and laugh at the faces they make when they drink it. I have a jar, and you can get used to it, but the point behind Georgia Moon is not to make a great-tasting corn whiskey. The same distillery takes the same stuff, ages if for a while, and sells it as Mellow Corn, which is purportedly a much better whiskey, but that's not available in stores around here. Just today I saw another corn whiskey, Virginia Lightning, in a store, which is intriguing but I have not tasted it.)

So anyway, you can imagine my pleasure when several of the craft distillers brought young whiskeys for us to taste. A couple of them, from Stranahan's in Colorado and Templeton Rye in Iowa, were not commercial products, but, a distillery in Wisconsin called Death's Door is making and marketing a product they call White Whiskey, which was quite tasty. I'm hoping I can find a bottle of it here. (The name comes from the name of the channel between the Door County peninsula and Washington Island, from whence comes the organic wheat the Death's Door guys use in their spirits. The actual distillery is in Madison, which has caused consternation to tourists who get all the way to Washington Island---which is way past the middle of nowhere---looking for the distillery.)

One of the other things I would do if I were a craft distiller is experiment with non-traditional mash bills. The world of spirits is driven by traditions which are nigh-inviolable. Whiskey can be made (theoretically) from any grain or combination of grains, but until a couple years ago there were only a few variants. Among American whiskeys, bourbon is mostly corn, with a smaller percentage of either rye or wheat and a little malted barley. Rye is mostly rye (duh) with a generous percentage of corn and the malted barley. Corn whiskey is basically a high-corn bourbon mashbill that is not aged in new oak barrels, and anyway it's so uncommon as to hardly count. There have been only two exceptions to the rules that I know of at least since prohibition: Anchor Distilling in San Fransisco made (and as far as I know still makes) whiskey usng malted rye, which has a very different flavor from unmalted rye. And a few years ago, Heaven Hill introduced Bernheim Straight Wheat Whiskey, which was made from mostly wheat with a generous percentage of corn.

So I was excited to learn that the Death's Door White Whiskey is made from almost entirely wheat---no corn at all. That's amazing, if you geek out on those kinds of things like I do. And I believe some of the wheat is malted, which would contribute a flavor to the whiskey that no other whiskey on earth (that I've heard about, anyway) has.

I go back and forth on whether WhiskeyFest is worth the money---it was nearly $100, although if you bought shots of all the whiskeys you can taste there in a bar, you would probably spend more than that, since some of those old and rare whiskeys can be pretty steep, so I suppose if you want to try a bunch of different whiskeys, it's a good way to do it. But this year I really enjoyed the presentations, and thinking back, I've seen some pretty cool presentations other years too. I'll probably go back.