June 2010 – Mouthful of Feathers

The MOF Whiskey Review

Matt Crawford:

I love Redbreast Irish Whiskey for a few reasons:

* It’s immensely “flaskable.”

* You can drink it in coffee, too

* You can call it Scotch and piss off the Scotch snobs

Greg McReynolds:

Famous Grouse

A better bargain-priced, blended scotch you will not find.

The grouse is ideal for drinking when it’s raining, especially while surfing gunbroker.com or reading the greatest American novel ever written.

I was drinking it when I met my wife, so it’s pretty classy to boot.

Plus, it’s named after the king of gamebirds.

Tosh Brown:

If we are truly products of our respective environs, then that pretty much makes me a beer swiller. It’s hot where I live, and I rarely find the need to pull warmth from a bottle.

But, if I had to pick a favorite distilled product, it would have to be a Macallan single malt. A buddy gives me a bottle for Christmas each year, and I usually try to make it last until the next one arrives. I suppose owning a bottle of pricey scotch could spawn guesses that I might be more of a highbrow “Scotch Snob” than I appear. That’s why I make a point of leaving the red bow and the gift card attached.

Bruce Smithhammer:

I’ll admit to enjoying the occasional bottle of Laphroaig, if only because how often do you get the opportunity to simulate falling face down in a peat bog and not being able to get up?

I also used to dabble in the Irish Whiskeys, until an evil voice at the bottom of a bottle of Jameson’s whispered in my ear that 2nd story balcony railings are great places to dance. Surgery and 6 screws in my ankle later, I have an immense amount of respect, mixed with fear, for residents of the Emerald Isle.

But lately my tastes have gone firmly in the Highland direction, and I can’t get enough of the fine products emanating from the Glenmorangie distillery, even when I’ve been repeatedly told that I’ve had, “more than enough.”

Blood lust

I’m going to admit to a blood lust. I like to kill and I love to hate.
But only one thing in particular: starlings. Stinking, shitting, filthy starlings.
I stalk them in my bathrobe. They flutter and twitter about the eaves of my home and crap all over my porch. They tweet in nails-on-chalkboard tones while I sip my morning coffee and I slip up on them with a twenty and blast them while they sit. Sometimes I get out the twelve . . . really whatever is handy. The twelve sits upstairs where I can load fast and shoot from an open window. The twenty by the sliding glass door downstairs. It is work done in slippers on the front lawn, robe flapping. It’s good not to have neighbors.
A challenging wingshot, but I will take whatever shot there is. The dogs twist in circles, mistaking an uncased gun and a creeping owner for September partridge steppes. Little matter, for when I fell one of the stink birds with a load of sixes, they rush in and fetch, only to spit the mangled bird out.
I kill the parents first and then get a ladder out and pull four screeching nestlings out to drown in the creek while the setters dance happily.
A fella has got to do something with summer.

IMGP2527 — There is little dignity for a bird dog posing next to a starling, but such is the off-season.

Expeditions in the city limits

I surreptitiously scan the rim, then the fence, looking for anyone with a badge, ticket book or binoculars. Seeing no one, I reach down and slip the leash from her head. She’s still waiting.
“Let’s hunt,” I tell her. There’s no whistle today and she rockets past the big white sign and its list of rules (No glass bottles. Dogs must be leashed. No hunting…) before she checks back. I hike up near the escarpment coiled leash in hand.
She knows there won’t be hups or yells, so she’s watching closely and only takes a few tenative steps after the big old jack she jumps.
Then she tightens her swing and I know they’re close even before I hear them. It’s a pair and when she puts them in the air, they stay low and only fly 50 yards or so before landing in a shallow wash not far from another sign listing the rules. Breathlessly happy, she comes to heel and I slip the leash over her head.
These are fat quail, gambels and scalies that thrive on sprinkler water and bird feeders before heading back to the basalt and cacti to hunker down at night. Like the patch of open space they inhabit on the fringes of the city, they straddle two worlds.
They shouldn’t be here. According to the big white sign, neither should we.

Snakes in the grass

The solstice is weeks away, but the heat has arrived in New Mexico and the prairie rattlers are sun bathing. This guy was hanging out not far from my house last week. It may be the Hopi rattlesnake sub-species, but I’m no herpetologist and that’s only a guess.

It’s time to step carefully and keep the dog on a short rein.