Music Friday: "Semi-Charmed Life"

It's a true sign that the marketers are going after your age group when a song you listened to and liked in your 20s is being used in a commercial. 

That's the case with Third Eye Blind's "Semi-Charmed Life." 

Random Notes from a Crank

Rachel Maddow covered the imbecility of the Secretary of Education extensively in one of her shows, but the marketing gurus took it a step further with this Instagram post. 

That's some pretty good satire right there. 

I happened upon an interesting article from the BBC that talks about how people are using brewers spent grain. They're experimenting will turning it into food products and an alternative to leather. Check it out in "How Beer Sludge Is Being Turned into Vegan Milk and Leather." 

My word-of-the-day calendar shows that today's word as "mala fide," which is an adverb or adjective meaning "with or in bad faith." That word sums up a lot about the current administration in D.C. 

My club, Tottenham Hotspur, have a huge away game tomorrow. 

As much as I like Ange, if he doesn't win it all in the Europa League, I think he's going to get sacked. 

The team went through a dreadful spell for about three months when they had all kinds of injuries, but with the way he has turned again or criticized the fans, I don't think he'll survive for next season. 

But I hope to be proven wrong by him winning a trophy and Spurs doing well in the remaining games in the Premier League. 

Random Notes from a Crank

As someone who works at a university, I'm often astounded and frustrated how some people with PhDs and impressive credentials can be really @#$%ing stupid.

I would like to watch a sporting event on television without having to listen to commercials about boner medicine. Please stop the incessant marketing of pecker pills. 

I need to start a campaign. 

Because I've become a fan of the TV series Manhattan, which is about the making of the atomic bomb, I recently purchased and have started reading the 25th anniversary edition of The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. When I got it in the mail I was a bit surprised. I didn't realize it was 747 pages long. I'll be reading about this history for a good while. 

Another TV series I've been watching is Jessica Jones on Netflix. I was not familiar with that character until I started doing some online sleuthing. I remember her being teamed up with Luke Cage toward the end of Matt Fraction's Iron Fist series, but she's quite the character. I've had experience with the villain of the series, Killgrave, in a Daredevil comic recently. So it seems like the TV series is piecing together parts of old story lines to create a clean narrative. Though a major discrepancy is that Killgrave, aka The Purple Man, looks normal in the Jessica Jones series. 

Regardless, I've enjoyed the series so far (I'm about six or seven episodes in). In fact, I think I like it better than the Daredevil Netflix series because I have little prior knowledge about Jessica Jones. With Daredevil, I've been reading those comic books since I was a kid. 

Like Wolverine was, Jessica Jones is a drinker, in particular bourbon. As a bourbon aficionado, I've noticed the brands of bourbon she drinks. So far it's been Jim Beam White, Wild Turkey 101, Four Rose Yellow Label, and Heaven Hill Bottled-in-Bond, which she wouldn't be able to get in New York City because it's only sold in Kentucky and Indiana. 

Bourbon Subterfuge

As I wrote about a while back, I've become a bit of bourbon dork/connoisseur, so I'm reading up on the history of the spirit and the current boom of America's spirit. 

Some bourbons and ryes out there craft interesting narratives for their products. Some of them are relatively true, but many of the stories behind the brands should be considered very creative non-fiction, and others stories are outright bullshit inventive marketing lies like the nonsense surrounding Templeton Rye. 

If you're interested in learning about some of those lies, check out Eric Felton's "Your 'Craft' Rye Whiskey Is Probably From a Factory Distillery in Indiana." 

In the article, you discover the shenanigans of Diageo and smaller producers. One of hyperlinks in the article via Sku's Recent Eats provides a comprehensive list of who is really producing what. 

It's good to see both Cedar Ridge in Swisher and Mississippi River Distilling Co. in Leclaire, Iowa are making their own stuff. I doubt the juice they make is as solid and consistent as many of the products from Heaven Hill, Buffalo Trace, and Four Roses, but it's good to see smaller companies out there hustling to make bourbon on their own.