Midnight in the Garden of Trivia and Pedantry

I got a pressure cooker for my birthday, and my goal is to learn to make red beans and rice. Red beans and rice were one of the favorite dishes of my youth, and I like them in just about any incarnation. It has been a long term goal of mine to be able to make them myself, and now that I've got the pressure cooker it's time to get serious.

The first step is to make decent tasting red beans and rice. The mountaintop is red beans and rice as tasty as the ones from Popeye's fried chicken. First, though, some decent home style red beans and rice. I'm using Chuck Taggart's recipe as a starting point, but I have to modify the recipe some because I'm using a pressure cooker. So I'm going to use the cooking times in the Kuhn Rikon recipe.

What was the last episode about?  The sword of Damocles. Very well done, indeed.

For our little downtown Raleigh festival, we were supposed to get the Drive-by Truckers, and wound up with Eddie Money. That's tough news to take.

So I think that Heroes star Peter Petrelli is dead. If you don't watch Heroes you have no idea what I'm talking about and you missed a great show that premiered last fall. You should catch up this summer or when it's released on DVD.

Anyway, I think Peter Petrelli is dead for the same reason that J K Rowling had to kill off Dumbledore at the end of book six of the Harry Potter series. Dumbledore had to exit the scene before the last book because he was a fair opponent for Voldemort. That's not dramatic. If Voldemort is to be defeated, he has to be defeated by Harry Potter.

The Peter Petrelli situation is similar. Peter becomes more and more powerful over time, and eventually he would become too powerful to write interesting stories about. So he has to be dead*. There is no other way. Sylar had to die for the same reason, and yeah, I think he's dead too.

* He could also turn evil, but since Peter is utterly noble, that's not in the cards.

Last night's episode of The Sopranos featured Yeats' The Second Coming. Obviously the tone of the poem mirrored AJ's own feelings of impending doom, but what does the poem portend for the show?  Only two episodes left.

Let's say you are hired as the new coach for some kind of sports team. What do you tell the press to give fans hope that the team will improve under your leadership?  You can't slag the players because they have to play for you, and it's discourteous to slag the previous coach. One day you'll be the previous coach and you don't want people talking you down when they replace you. There seems to be one thing you can say that's politically correct in the culture of coaching, and that is that you will improve strength and conditioning. Every new coach talks about how he's putting in a new strength and conditioning program that will make everything better. The sad thing is, until recently I actually believed it.

I've been watching Lost from the beginning, but I'm kind of wishing they'd wrap things up.  Turns out, that won't be happening anytime soon. The creators of the show have signed on for three more seasons, albeit of only 16 episodes each. That means we won't find out the fate of our favorite (and least favorite) castaways until the spring of 2010.  I'll probably just be reading the recaps on Television Without Pity by then.

I like Peter King pretty well as far as sportswriters go, but you have to wonder about a guy who goes on vacation in Europe and hits the local Starbucks (skip to the last page) in every port of call. This is a guy who bills himself as a "coffee nerd". In his dreams, perhaps.

If you could have one superpower, what would you choose?
Submitted by J.T.

I'd choose to be able to learn more quickly and to remember everything I learn.  A trivia and pedantry-oriented super power.

Last night on Lost, the evil Mr. Widmore taunted Desmond with a drink of 60 year old whisky, telling him that one sip cost more than Desmond could make in a month. So I wondered, is old whisky really quite that expensive? The answer is that it's probably not that expensive, but it's pretty darn expensive. We turn to the Macallan vintages FAQ:

Some of these Macallan vintages seem very expensive compared with vintage releases from other distilleries; why?
The prices charged for these Macallan vintages reflect both their scarcity and the vintage year in which they were distilled. They also reflect the extraordinary prestige of The Macallan, which is regarded around the world as one of the greatest single malts. It has been referred to as, "The Petrus of the whisky world", "the Dom Perignon of Scotch" among other and many great accolades.

Will these vintages appreciate in value?
You have to be cautious with any prediction of future value, but it is true to say that The Macallan is regarded as the most collectable of all single malts, and that bottles at auction have seen a steady appreciation in value over the years. For example, a Macallan bottled for the Royal Marriage of Charles and Diana in 1981 was then retailed for £40. It now fetches £350 at auction. A bottle of The Macallan 1926 (bottled in 1986 as a 60 yo) sold for £6,375 at auction in 1991; in May 2002, another bottle of 1926 achieved the world record price for a bottle of single malt, £20,150!

You can purchase a bottle of Macallan 30 year old for £295.00.

The other question you have to ask is whether Macallan 1926 is any good?  Whisky magazine says it's good, but at those prices I'd expect something life changing. 

This post brought to you by a Google search for "whisky 60 year old".