Louisiana

The Sazerac: an old favorite… from New Orleans

As the Super Bowl rolled into New Orleans, with Kendrick Lamar and his flared jeans in tow, I was thinking about the many contributions that this small Louisiana city has brought to the cocktail bar. There’s the creamy green Grasshopper, the French Quarter’s whiskey-based Vieux Carré, the tropical rum punch Hurricane and, of course, the comically difficult Ramos Gin Fizz – which blooms up in a tower of egg-white froth. But perhaps the oldest, most widespread and most conventional is the Sazerac: it is considered one of America’s oldest cocktails, having been served in New Orleans from the late 19th century.

Splitsville: separatist movements are gaining steam in blue states

Matt McCaw doesn’t want to live anywhere but in Oregon. But during the pandemic he felt like he was living under tyrannical rule imposed by the state’s progressive majority in metro Portland. The school that his six children attended closed for more than a year due to a state mandate — and they received just four hours of online instruction per week. His church was forced to close, and his business selling textbooks suffered because school districts were buying online curricula, not physical books. Mask and vaccine mandates were ubiquitous; McCaw couldn’t even take his wife out to dinner to break the monotony, because all the restaurants were takeout-only. “I thought there would be a huge political backlash against all that,” he says.

separatist

How serious is the feral pig problem?

Let’s play a guessing game: I’m a dangerous force threatening Americans’ health, safety and way of life. We largely rely on government agencies to monitor and manage me. What to do about me is still a matter of debate, as is the severity of the menace I actually create. The media is likely sensationalizing the threat. A new study suggests I’m “not as bad as originally thought,” that reports of the devastation I’m causing were “premature,” and that if you’re outside a specific subset of people I disproportionately affect, you wouldn’t know I exist. Still, there are interactive maps to track my movement, and I’m reported to be related to a new, “hard-to-eradicate, super” strain invading from a foreign country. What am I? Yep, you guessed it.

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Livvy Dunne and the era of the hot, rich female college athlete

Livvy Dunne is in a “cute lil jammy set Santa got me” when she answers questions from some of her 3.7 million adoring Instagram fans. You’ve probably never heard of her unless you spend a lot of time on TikTok. But twenty-year-old Olivia Paige Dunne is now the highest-valued women's college athlete, with an estimated net worth of $3.3 million. And fair play to her: at twenty years old, I was working for minimum wage as a waitress. I know very little about college sports or gymnasts such as Livvy, but nowadays having 7.1 million TikTok followers, as she does, means something. If she were to never partake in another event, she could still bring in a monthly salary far higher than most. https://www.tiktok.

olivia livvy dunne

Saying bye-bye to Beto

Bye-bye, Beto. Well, the self-serving political show-off known to Karl Rove in his Wall Street Journal commentaries as Robert Francis O’Rourke, of El Paso, Texas (“Roberto” in Español = “Beto”). Texans rejected his latest overtures and entreaties, re-electing Republican Governor Greg Abbott by an 11 percent margin on November 8. The margin ought to have been larger, given Beto’s lack of serviceable credentials, and it would have been, save for all the outside money and media fawning that came Beto's way. Still, 11 percent did the job. It finished, in Texas at least, Beto’s career of self-promotion, removing him from the reach of the credulous and naïve. At least I hope so!