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Kingsley_Amis

Some Amis, with my commentary:

"Wives and such are constantly filling up any refrigerator they have a claim on, even its ice-compartment, with irrelevant rubbish like food. Get one of your own and have it fitted with racks the thickness of a bottle apart." Kingsley Amis. Amen to that. We have two refrigerators, and it's hell looking for limes, lemons, a particular beer, etc. It's gotten even worse with the advent of my degenerative back disk. Thankfully, Marie is still spry and able to do the stooping.

On Music in bars: "If you dislike what is being played, you use up energy and patience in the attempt to ignore it; if you like it, you will want to listen to it and not to talk or be talked to, not to do what you came to the pub largely to do." Kingsley Amis. I agree with Amis on this one if the music is loud, but I think music in the background is important in a social setting. It fills in the gaps. I guess if you're with real old friends, the kind you can sit with and not talk for ten minutes with no awkward feeling, you might not need the background music, but otherwise, mild music in the background is nice.

On the Little Arts: "Serving good drinks, like producing anything worth while, from a poem to a motor-car, is troublesome and expensive." Yes, rat own. And it makes a huge difference, as the cocktailing world has figured out. The difference between a thoughtful vodka-tonic and sloshing Mountain Dew over cheap vodka is huge . . . and the difference between a well-crafted complex cocktail and a decent vodka-tonic is more than negligible.

On Pure Evil: "A friend of mine, whose mother-in-law gets a little excited after a couple of drinks, goes one better in preparing her third by pouring tonic on ice, wetting a fingertip with gin and passing it round the rim of the glass, but victims of this procedure must be selected with extreme care." Hoooo. That's a tough one. Tricking a person into thinking he's getting alcohol but isn't. I agree with Amis: Victims must be selected with extreme care. If someone did this to me after just two drinks, there'd be hell to pay. But after three drinks, as the evening is wearing on? It could be an act of charity.

Bar Trivia: "Poe himself had a drink problem; contrary to popular belief, he was not a dipsomaniac, but his system was abnormally intolerant of alcohol, so that just a couple of slugs would lay him on his back, no doubt with a real premature-burial of a hangover to follow." I've ran into this problem twice this year (yes, 2016). I am hellbent to lose twenty pounds, with the result that I am constantly hungry and fatigued. This has twice spun my system out of whack prematurely while drinking . . . and one time gave me the premature-burial of a hangover. Until I stabilize my weight under 170 pounds, I've sworn off more than two (okay, maybe three) moderate drinks at a sitting.

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