Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. And I am on vacation, as of right now! As you are reading this, I’m on the road to Harveysburg, Ohio. Tomorrow I’m spending all day at the Ohio Renaissance Faire, dressed as a pirate, drinking rum, watching shows, buying cool things, and generally having a blast. I’ve been working hard all year long, and I need to recharge. I’m going to make it easy on myself and write about my favorite cocktail of all time — a Mai Tai — and relax over the weekend. Here’s the recipe.

House Mai Tai

2 oz Hamilton 86 Rum

1 oz fresh lime juice

1 oz house orgeat

1 oz Ferrand Dry Curacao

Shake all ingredients over ice. Strain into a mai tai glass over ice and garnish with a lime wheel, cherry, and mint sprig.

House Orgeat

1 cup unsweetened almond milk

2 cups white sugar

¼ t orange blossom water

¼ sea salt

Place all ingredients in a small saucepan. Simmer over low heat until the sugar has completely dissolved. Pour into a sealable bottle and refrigerate. Keeps indefinitely.

I’ve written about the Mai Tai many, many, many, many times in the past. There’s a reason for that. It’s my favorite cocktail of all time. It might not be the best cocktail in the world, but it’s pretty darn close. If I could only drink one cocktail for the rest of my life, this would be the one. I love rum passionately, and this drink is designed from the ground up to celebrate my favorite spirit.

The history of the Mai Tai is a tiki legend. As the story goes, Trader Vic was working late at the bar with some Polynesian friends, trying to find a good recipe for a bottle of 17-year-old Wray and Nephew rum that had fallen into his possession. He shook up the original Mai Tai and handed it to his friend, who exclaimed, “Mai tai!” —Polynesian for “you nailed it!’ The original 17-year-old rum is long gone, but Mai Tai enthusiasts have used a blend of excellent rums to recreate the original.

Mai Tais and margaritas are kissing cousins. If you squint your eyes and look at both recipes together, you can see how each ingredient replaces the other. Rum for tequila, curaçao for triple sec, lime juice, orgeat for agave syrup — it makes sense, kinda. It’s a useful analogy for bartenders. The margarita is the most popular cocktail in America; if you’re behind the pine, you’ve cranked out dozens by now, and you understand how to make one tarter, sweeter, or more spirit-forward for a given customer. Mai Tais are no different. The recipe I’ve provided is pretty balanced, but if you prefer a sharper, sweeter, or more rum-laden Mai Tai, it should be easy to tweak the recipe to your tastes. (It’s worth noting that Vic put a tequila version of the Mai Tai on the menu in the ‘70s, called the Pinky Gonzales.)

Unfortunately, modern pop culture seems to think that a “mai tai” is any sort of sweet rum and fruit juice combination, which results in some … interesting drinks. Captain Morgan is currently selling a canned (rumless) “Mango Mai Tai,” and a few cans of (coconut water flavored?) Cutwater Tiki Mai Tai cocktails are lurking in my pantry. I swear that the local hibachi joint once served me a “Mai Tai” with none of the original ingredients, up to and including the rum. Drink the original. Make it yourself. I’m on vacation. You deserve a treat.

Let’s talk ingredients:

Hamilton 86 Rum: My favorite rum of all time. Use your favorite. I’ve seen recipes for the Mai Tai that use no less than four different rums, including Smith and Cross, Plantation OFTD, and other rums I’d love to have in my liquor cabinet. An unaged Jamaican rum like Probitas would be great. If you’re using Bacardi, dial up the other ingredients and push the rum into the background a touch. Don’t use Captain Morgan. Please. I’m begging you.

Fresh Lime Juice: It is proving absurdly hard to get good limes in my corner of the world. Tiny, dry, juiceless limes are all too common. Look for a lime that’s the size of a decent lemon that isn’t rock hard to the touch.

Orgeat: It’s pronounced “Orzeat,” like Zsa Zsa Gabot. I can order some good almond syrups online, but they’re expensive and a pain in the butt to have delivered. This grocery-store version of the cocktail ingredient works just fine.

Ferrand Dry Curacao: This curacao is less sweet than Grand Marnier, which lets other flavors in the drink come forward. Use Grand Marnier in a pinch, but dial back the orgeat to compensate.

My home bar is Hemingway’s Underground, the hottest cocktail bar in pretty little Medina, Ohio. I’m behind the stick Wednesday-Saturday, 4-10. Last call’s at midnight. Swing on by and I’ll make a drink for you… or anything else from our little Happy Hour here at Wonkette.

OPEN THREAD!

Tip your bartender!

So a week or two ago I realized I was getting very, perhaps dangerously depressed. I don’t have a clinical diagnosis but I have had enough experience with this (through others; my wife certainly) to know what’s going on. But it still creeps up because even though you know what it is, you would really prefer it wasn’t. So it kind of creeps up in plain sight.

One of the big signs, which I should watch closer, but then I was watching it and I knew it was going on, so wtf, was playing World of Warcraft fairly obsessively. Interrupting work, interrupting my household duties, and so on. Another was stealing hours to myself by staying up way too late after chores and WoW were done.

What WoW was giving me was twofold. First of course it gave me a fairly inert way to spend time that didn’t seem inert. It’s not like watching cartoon since you have to make decisions, but at the endgame you are mostly doing the same thing over and over (trying to make gold in time-tested ways) so that you can afford to buy the consumables necessary to do another same thing over and over (raid giant dungeons, but basically the same three dungeons you’ve seen a hundred times already).

The other hole it was filling was social: I was playing with a lot of awesome people, new friends, and was having a wonderful time with them socially. So much fun that I did what I usually do in that situation and find a leadership role with lots of responsibilities and new pressures. This initially helps my depression (purpose, respect) but in short order become another one of the feedback loops that keeps me doing something I don’t really want to do.

This is all, however reinforcing, still symptomatic. I was depressed. I was not enjoying my life but rather desperately trying to find ways to fill a hole that can’t really be filled. I was skipping tabletop game sessions because my chores were backing up and the thought of being creative (which WoW is certainly not) with people I love and respect was just too much pressure, too much expectation, too much work. I couldn’t handle it.

At some point someone announced they were withdrawing from the guild in our WoW game and that gave me permission to do the same. So I did a few things:

• I quit the officer role in our guild (dumping responsibility)
• I quit playing WoW (dumping the pressure to use time on something essentially useless)
• I bought an air pistol (because I like them)
• I set up a gun range upstairs and shot the shit out of some targets

So the first two are obvious. The second two maybe less so.

Retail therapy works. And I had my eye on something I could afford and had always wanted for a long time. Buying it let me congratulate myself with something concrete. I felt some measure of relief just making the purchase. I can afford it. It’s probably stupid. But the heart wants what the heart wants.

The gun range is a little more complex.

I am not a gun person in one sense: I don’t own real firearms, I don’t want to own real firearms, I don’t want to ever shoot at anyone even in self defense. I am, however, fascinated by the mechanical engineering of handguns. Just handguns — I don’t really care about long arms. This has long been the case with me — as a kid I owned models of real handguns with working action and realistic disassembly procedures. And I’ve always been amazed at how many auto-loading firearms are basically just held together with spring tension. They enclose and utilize an explosive force to engage a mechanical action that reloads and re-cocks the weapon and yet they are held together by almost nothing. Push a bit here, flip a lever, and they come apart.

Maybe you need to hang with engineers to find that fascinating.

So what I bought was an airgun that is a replica of a Walther P-08 Luger that uses the CO2 gas pressure for both firing the BB and working the action just like the real firearm to reload and recock. And that was the model I had as a kid. So now I had it in metal, with weight, and it did in fact disassemble just like I remember. 40 years later I can trivially break it down and put it back together. But this one shoots and so I get to enjoy the feel of that action jumping up while shooting.

Shooting is tremendous fun, even if it’s just a gas BB gun. And I presume this fun is chemically represented somehow since I genuinely feel it. Endorphins, whatever, I’m no chemist, but it made me feel great. And while initially it felt weird to shoot down the hall into the bath/shower stall through the old shower curtain (which I bought a replacement for a few weeks ago), it was safe (shower curtain provides a great capture for a plastic BB and no danger to the tile) and it was long enough to be fun (5 or 6 meters) and god damn I had a good time.

Now I feel much better. I am still coping with reduced social contact thanks to the Virus, but I am coping better. I don’t know whether changing my behaviour broke the depression or a natural subsidence of the depression allowed me to shuck the (rather destructive) immersion in a game. But it doesn’t matter. I was worried that since WoW ate up all my time I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. This was bullshit of course since there are a million things around the house that need doing because I was tending to WoW instead of the house. So after destroying the shower curtains I started cleaning the kitchen, clipping the cats’ claws, hurling garbage (an old shower curtain amongst it)…you know, the stuff you’re supposed to do in life. That is, not farming Dreamfoil and Arcane Crystals.

First thing I’ll do once things get a little more normal is seek out a club where I can shoot with other nerds. Outside. With people.

Did I break my depression or did I respond to its natural departure? I dunno. I’m going to go shoot up the bathtub.

Please enjoy with me a little comic taken from our Sand Dogs play and brought to life by the amazing Juan Ochoa. Thanks Juan!

This post was made possible by my patrons.

It’s warm and windy in the valley today. The sun feels so good on my skin, as the breeze swirls little cyclones of leaves and trash against the buildings I’m walking past. A palm frond waves at me as I pass. It is barely clinging to the trunk of its tree, and will probably come down with the first real gust that hits it at dusk.

I have my headphones in my pocket, but I decide to leave them there and let my mind wander. It’s good to be bored. It’s good to rely on my own imagination to entertain me as I walk home from lunch with my friends, who I haven’t seen in months.

I have this story idea I’ve been working on. It’s kind of silly, but it’s entertaining to me, and it should be fun to write. I spend most of my walk working on its first line, which is currently sounding like, “Matthew woke up with the kind of hangover that can only be described apocryphally. ”

I try lots of variations, but that’s the one I keep coming back to. I don’t know if it’s as good as I think it is. Maybe it’s lazy and not as evocative as I think it is, but it’s what I can do right now.

The wind blows some dust into my face and I have to take off my glasses to wipe out my eyes. A kid, probably in 10th or 11th grade, walks past me, backpack slung over one shoulder, face buried in their phone. I can relate to this kid. They are dressed a little punk rock, with torn jeans and a T-shirt from a band I’ve never heard of. Many piercings, brightly colored hair that’s cut into a style I haven’t seen before.

I want to tell this kid that they’re awesome for being weird. I decide to keep my mouth shut because this kid doesn’t care what an old man thinks, and neither do I, it turns out.

Maybe it’s being adjacent to what I have labeled as youthful rebellion, but I cross the street against a red light. I’m not going to stand here on the corner when there’s no traffic, and wait for a light that is just slowing me down, man.

As I cross the center line, I see a motorcycle cop, who has pulled someone over and is writing them a ticket. Yeah. I’m jaywalking. Fuck the police. I’m a middle-aged rebel and what are you going to do about it?

Last night, we went to a screening for our friend’s new Netflix series, BLACK SUMMER. It’s set in a zombie apocalypse, but it’s really about what happens when society collapses and we have to rely on strangers to survive. It’s about the sacrifices we make for our children. It’s about authoritarianism and violence for violence’s sake.

As I walk down the quiet, suburban street, on the most beautiful day we’ve had in months, I think about what we watched. I think about what I would do if something catastrophic happens and I have to protect myself and the people I love. I think about how terrible the world is right now, how loud the voices of hate and anger are, and how grateful I am to be outside, in the warm sunshine, walking home to my dogs. I think about how powerless I feel. I think about how afraid I am of my country, my community, my entire world being slowly torn apart. I don’t know if a zombie apocalypse would bring out the best in us, or if it would just exacerbate our divisions.

I want to have faith in humanity. I want to expect the best of people. But fool me once and so forth.

I’m so tired.

The sun is at my back. My black T-shirt is a heat sink and a small bead of sweat runs down my spine.

It feels good to be outside. The world is a terrible place right now, but it feels good to be out in it, alone with my thoughts and aspirations. It is good to be outside, enjoying a beautiful day, being grateful for my life and the people in it.

It has been an indescribably painful seven months. Every day has been a struggle, but every day has been a gift.

I’m doing the best I can, and I have to remind myself that my best will have to be enough, and I’ll have to keep doing it, even when it feels like it isn’t enough, because it’s all I can do.

The wind is at my back now, and it blows my hair up into an approximation of my bedhead. That makes me smile. I leave it alone, resist the reflex to smooth it out and make myself more presentable. Nobody cares, and neither should I.

Could I survive the zombie apocalypse? Or would I welcome it? I’m not ready to honestly explore the question, because whatever the answer is, I don’t think I’m prepared for it.

College is expensive af!

When I was 17 years old and set to graduate from high school, my mother told me she couldn’t afford to send me to college. Like most young people, I was sold the dream of college. I wanted a better life for myself, but my family was poor. Like really poor. Growing up on the Southside of Chicago, many of my peers were in the same boat.  I wanted an intellectual expansion and a job that would pay me a living wage, which college would be able to grant me.

Or so I thought.

I ended up joining the Navy and was able to go to college on the G.I. Bill. I got my undergraduate degree for next to nothing, but I was an idiot and decided to go to get my social work degree (not a career you choose if you want to ball like 2Chainz or Weezy) from the University of Chicago. Nowadays, I cry myself to sleep every night holding my master’s degree and avoiding any calls from FedLoan Servicing.

The cost of college is no joke, so much that the fact that many universities and colleges are considered nonprofits is almost laughable. The cost of college tuition has skyrocketed since the decade of my birth. Every March, millions of fans across the country tune in for March Madness and, in the process, colleges and universities make millions of dollars from advertisers and corporate sponsors yet puzzlingly 1) can’t afford to reduce tuition for students, and 2) pay their student-athletes. In fact, many student-athletes can’t afford to eat three square meals a day, or (in some cases) eat a meal at all. The kicker is that, despite this bleak reality, student-athletes still fare better than most of their peers because at least they get tuition-free college.

While some older people joke that college students are all poor but really have mommy and daddy paying their bills, that joke only pertains to the minority of privileged students. For many students, the financial burden of obtaining a higher education is far out of reach and comes with the reality of crippling, lifelong debt. Students from poor and lower-middle-class backgrounds are genuinely feeling pressure. This has only gotten worse since I graduated well over a decade ago.

Feel Da Bern

Bernie “the insane socialist” Sanders might be the second most divisive man in the U.S. politics outside of Agent Orange “I love my daughter in a very uncomfortable way” Trump. But Bernie was on to something with his policy proposal to make college affordable to all. This is something done in many Western Nations but not in the so-called “greatest country of all time” the United States of America. U.S. critics claim that free college is socialism. Well, paved roadways, public libraries, the Post Office, the fire department, and the water you use to flush your crap down the toilet are all socialist in nature. Somehow, we’re all okay with that type of socialism but think making college free is a step too far.

College students shouldn’t have to go hungry, pimp themselves out, couch surf, or not have a stable place to stay just to obtain a degree.

All is not lost, though, and there are some sensible solutions to this crisis:

• Free and/or reduced tuition at public colleges and trade schools for all (we can use part of our bloated six-hundred billion defense budget and tax Wall-Street speculation to fund this endeavor)
• Forgive all student loan debt (yes we can do it, and we basically did the same thing for companies during the bailout)
• Colleges and universities should no longer be considered nonprofits if they insist upon charging tuition
• Reduced or lower housing and rent costs for college students from households that earn less than 150k per year
• Students tuition rates should be determined by majors or trade (because a corporate attorney makes way more than a pre-school teacher and should not be incurring the same amount of debt)
• A basic universal income for all students

But this is all probably just a little too much socialism for ‘Murica.

Haskell is a great language, but debugging Haskell is undoubtedly a weak spot. To help with that problem, I've just released the debug library. This library is intended to be simple and easy to use for a common class of debugging tasks, without solving everything. As an example, let's take a function we are interested in debugging, e.g.:

module QuickSort(quicksort) where
import Data.List

quicksort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a]
quicksort [] = []
quicksort (x:xs) = quicksort lt ++ [x] ++ quicksort gt
    where (lt, gt) = partition (<= x) xs

Turn on the TemplateHaskell and ViewPatterns extensions, import Debug, indent your code and place it under a call to debug, e.g.:

{-# LANGUAGE TemplateHaskell, ViewPatterns #-}
module QuickSort(quicksort) where
import Data.List
import Debug

debug [d|
   quicksort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a]
   quicksort [] = []
   quicksort (x:xs) = quicksort lt ++ [x] ++ quicksort gt
       where (lt, gt) = partition (<= x) xs
   |]

We can now run our debugger with:

$ ghci QuickSort.hs
GHCi, version 8.2.1: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/  :? for help
[1 of 1] Compiling QuickSort        ( QuickSort.hs, interpreted )
Ok, 1 module loaded.
*QuickSort> quicksort "haskell"
"aehklls"
*QuickSort> debugView

The call to debugView starts a web browser to view the recorded information, looking something like:

From there you can click around to explore the computation.

I'm interested in experiences using debug, and also have a lot of ideas for how to improve it, so feedback or offers of help most welcome at the bug tracker.

If you're interested in alternative debuggers for Haskell, you should check out the GHCi debugger or Hood/Hoed.