Serious Eats presents the Baracktail for post-Inauguration toasts:
It begins with gin, of Chicago bootlegging fame. Hawaiian hibiscus flowers infuse the syrup that sweetens and stains it. Lime is added for a touch of acerbic rhetoric, and the tang of hard times. And mint, tons of mint, remind us there can always be a very, very fresh start. This cocktail is like spring cleaning: flowers, mint, and citrus to scrub away the dirty past and welcome a clean, fresh beginning.
Ingredients
2 stems mint
Ice
2 ounces gin
2 ounces hibiscus syrup (You can buy Wild Hibiscus or use this recipe from Giada de Laurentiis)
Sugar
1 ounce fresh lime juice, reserving squeezed lime for sugaring glass rim
Procedure
1. In the bottom of a cocktail shaker, drop the leaves of 2 stems of mint, and add some ice. With the back of a wooden spoon, muddle the mint leaves until they are bruised and broken.
2. Pour in the hibiscus syrup, lime juice, and gin. Shake the cocktail until cold.
3. Pour a thin layer of sugar onto a rimmed baking sheet. Run squeezed lime around the rim of a martini glass; invert glass and dip in sugar to lightly coat the rim. Pour the cold Baracktail into the glass, and take a sip.
Oh, my neighborhood. There was just some white guy in the Laundromat trying to mediate between the Brazilian owner and a Bangladeshi customer who wanted to change the channel on the TV. After he goes through this song and dance about how the owner "would prefer to keep control of the tv," the Bangladeshi lady's like, Whatever, I don't speak Spanish. The white guy's like, Actually she speaks Portuguese. I'm like, @@ (Not that the owner or the white guy were wrong, just... work it out people! How much of a common language do you need to get across, "Don't change the channel!" and then deal with it?)
A clip of a 1964 BBC interview of Dr. Martin Luther King, where he predicts the US would have an African-American president in less than 40 years: : Dr King's Prediction
BBC World News America has unearthed a fascinating clip
Dude, they so did not! We totally passed it on to them as a FAVOR!
t /interdepartmental squabble
Oooh! BBC fight! BBC fight!
Man, I am so going to SEND A TERSELY WORDED MEMO over this. And then complain about it ON MY BLOG. That'll show 'em...
Man, I am so going to SEND A TERSELY WORDED MEMO over this. And then complain about it ON MY BLOG. That'll show 'em...
That reminds me that I threatened to send a "strongly-worded" email to the Publix (heh heh) HQ while we were in Orlando last week. They put only pinenuts in the store in the Chinese food section. And they were an Italian brand jar labeled "Pignoli." I never would have found them if I hadn't asked 2 managers (very nice and helpful, told me hq told them were to stock everything, they had no control over it).
DH's magazine is blogging the living hell out of Obama this week, and here's his latest contribution: other superheroes Obama should meet.
So if the UN's International Court of Justice orders the state of Texas not to execute a Mexican citizen, but Texas executes them anyway, how bad is that?
US execution 'defied court order'
The International Court of Justice says the US was in breach of an order not to execute a Mexican man sentenced to death in Texas after a flawed trial.
The court was handing down judgment in a bid by Mexico to force a review of the sentences of 51 of its citizens on death row in the US.
Mexico says the US ignored a ruling by the court in 2004 that America had denied the Mexicans consular access.
The court said then that the convictions should be reconsidered.
The International Court of Justice - the UN's highest court - issued an emergency ruling last July intended to halt pending executions.
But three weeks later Texas gave a lethal injection to Jose Medellin, convicted of the rape and murder of two teenage girls.
"The court... finds that the United States of America has breached the obligation incumbent upon it," the ICJ - sitting in The Hague - ruled.
...
The US says that it took steps to comply with the judgement but cannot compel individual state courts to comply.
Some US states have agreed to review their death row cases but Texas maintains that its state courts are not bound by the International Court of Justice.
I suppose the UN isn't too popular in Texas anyway....
