Art of the Odd

I’ve mentioned before that I like absinthe candy – that bitterly crystalline, spirit-soaked sugar left on the spoon after fire and water have ravished the fey. Today Boing Boing tells me that Lollyphile will send me a whole box of absinthe pops, stripped of both ritual and thujone. The novelty value tempts me, but not enough to send in my order. Yet.

In other news, and also via Boing Boing, I’ve just heard Stephen Fry say, “Language is the universal whore that I must make into a virgin,” quoting “Karl Kraus or somebody so like him that it makes no odds,” and fallen madly in love with him all over again. The transcript of the PodGram is here, but please don’t deny yourself the beauty of the man’s voice – download the PodGram itself straightaway.

I’m not an absinthe connoisseur, but I’ve drunk a bit of it – enough that I’ve gotten used to the bitterness, anyway. And I do prefer the more bitter absinthes I’ve tried to the stickier, Absente-type liqueurs.

My introduction to absinthe came courtesy of the Czech Underground in San Francisco – a gaggle of Czech immigrants we’ve stayed with a few times during the SF Fringe. One of them had several bottles, in various stages of being drunk, and so we sampled them, working our way through various stages of being drunk. I didn’t care for most of them, but I did enjoy the absinthe candy created by caramelizing absinthe-soaked sugar in a spoon. So, the rest of the group would carry out the ritual of flaming sugar and water, and I’d lick the resulting absinthe lollipops.

A few years later, though, NovySan bought some really good absinthe from the Czech Republic. (He also drank a bit too much of it on his birthday, but that’s a whole different story.) The bottle lasted quite a long time – it’s not the kind of thing you sip before dinner, and you’ve got to be in the mood. But it’s an interesting bottle to have around, and now our friends Mikl and Danielle have introduced me to a wider range of cocktails, I think it might be something I’d like to experiment with.

Which brings me to this:

Absinthe

Absinthe Original’s offering a free absinthe spoon (pretty!) for posting a banner, and a free bottle of their Absinthe Innocent (which is supposed to be slightly more bitter, but have a lower alcohol content, that the Absinthe Original) for keeping it up for a year. And although I generally steer clear of posting ads here (despite the occasional Amazon link), it’s NaBloPoMo and I’d love a free bottle of absinthe.

And even though I know they won’t send me two bottles for posting two banners:

Absinthe

She’s hot. (Of course she is, she’s paid to be.) And I love her hair. The only reason she wasn’t my banner of choice is that I think “Turn your present into a party” is a very silly slogan. (Yes, even sillier than “The most mysterious and misunderstood of forbidden liquors.”)