While we were at the Hoosier Round up last month, one of my brother-in-laws brought over a quart jar of apple pie corn liquor.  It was sweet, spicy, had a nice burn, and kicked like a mule. And to my surprise, it was 100% legal.

Junior Johnson, former bootlegger and NASCAR driver, has lent his name to a brand of legal moonshine, and it’s quite tasty.

Tonight at the liquor store, I picked up two jars of it, the apple pie and strawberry.

The apple pie variety is a very nice golden color, and sports a piece of cinnamon stick floating in the bottom of the jar.  It has a nice tart apple taste, and the alcohol and cinnamon combine to give it a good spicy flavor and burn.  This is strong, but not unpleasant.  The smell of the drink is exactly what it says on the label – apple pie, although too deep a snort might singe the hair in your nose.  It’s only 70 proof, but it tastes so good that it’s easy to keep taking pulls on your tumbler or straight from the jar.  It’ll kick you in the back of the head if you’re not careful.

The strawberry flavor has a nice red color to it, and is slightly higher proof than the apple pie.  The liquor is flavored with strawberries which float in the jar.  Where the cinnamon stick in the apple pie stays at the bottom, the strawberry floats at the top, making a pour into a tumbler more of a challenge.  The drink smells very distinctly of strawberries, and is quite pleasant.  By that I mean that it smells of real strawberries, not the artificial sicky-sweet smell of other strawberry products.  The strawberry also comes through in the flavor, but not as distinctly as the apple and cinnamon in the apple pie.  It also has a burn to it, and you can feel it all the way down.  Something tells me that when this jar is empty, eating that strawberry is going to be an adventure.

Packaging of both is in the classic manner for moonshine – a mason jar.  This is a nice touch, but it can make a pour ta bit more complicated than with a narrow necked bottle.  It’s easy to over pour your glass, but then, it’s good enough that a little extra isn’t going to hurt.

Price was OK for a novelty drink.  Both varieties were $19 apiece at my store, and from what I can see you won’t find this in a less expensive place anytime soon.  I’ve heard reports that it’s popular here in Louisville, so if you can find it, it’ll probably go for a bit more than other drinks of its niche.

The company also offers moonshine flavored with cherry, blueberry, and cranberry, and bottles of unflavored white liquor are also available.  My store also had the cherry flavor, so I may pay them a visit next payday and get a jar of that.  I’ll also be on the lookout for the cranberry, as that is one of my favorite flavors.

Overall, I’d say that this moonshine is a good value for something to nip on occasion.  Of the two, I prefer the apple pie, but I tend to prefer spicier flavors over sweet.  Like I said, it’s so well-flavored that it would not be hard to over-indulge.  But this will make a good sipping drink or something to bring out when company is over.

Well, it’s been about five days since I made an unscheduled upgrade in cell phone due to atmospheric dampness and an inability to do the differential equation between the rate at which a pocket will fill through the zipper and empty through the seam at the bottom.

So far, the iPhone 4s has been every bit as good as the iPhone 4, but not much better.  Here are some thoughts:

• The salesman made a big deal about how the 4g network on the 4s was much faster than the 3g on the 4.  I’ve surfed the web, downloaded a couple of books, and looked at photos on FaceBook, and I haven’t noticed much difference.
• The processor is a bit faster in starting my apps, but it’s not a quantum leap.
• The display, however, is absolutely wonderful.  With the 4, I usually had trouble reading it in direct sunlight.  With the 4s, it’s still bright and crisp.
• The size of the phone is, to me, not significantly different from the 4, either in thickness or weight.
• Siri is kind of neat, but she has trouble understanding when I say “Call Irish Woman, Main” that I mean for the phone to call Irish Woman on her main phone number.  Siri interprets that to mean “Maine”, which I guess would be useful if she was in the extreme north-east, but since she’s in Louisville, it’s annoying.  On the 4, it was never a problem.

I’ll see how I feel after a few months, but so far, it’s not that much of an improvement over what it replaced.

A few months ago, I reviewed the Maxpedition Mongo Versapack messenger bag.  I’ve used this bag just about every day, and it’s been great.

I did find one quibble today:While the pocket on the buckle-down flap on the outside of the pack is water resistant, the zipper at the top of the pocket is not.  When walking through a torrential rain storm without an umbrella this morning, I discovered that the difference between the zipper letting water in  and the bottom of the pocket letting water out is quite large.  It is large enough, in fact, that  it will fill the pocket  approximately 1/3 full with rainwater in just a few minutes.

Coincidentally, business cards and an iPhone 4 are also not waterproof.

The good news is that the laptop that was in the main part of the pack was bone dry.

In related news, I was up for an upgrade at the cell phone store, and I like the new iPhone 4s I got at lunch today.

Oh well, I’m already putting money in the gun fund anyway.  It’ll build up again given enough time.

Last night, Irish Woman and I went out to see a movie that wasn’t animated or involve puppets.   The Avengers looked tempting, but we decided to go for Dark Shadows.  This is another Tim Burton / Johnny Depp collaboration, and you can tell these two have become very good at working together.

The story is basically this:  Rich boy meets poor girl, poor girl throws herself at rich boy, rich boy rejects poor girl in favor of another, poor girl bewitches her rival, who commits suicide.  Rich boy follows suit, but wakes from the dead as a vampire.  Poor girl has rich boy vampire locked in a coffin and buried, then spends 200 years tormenting his family.  Rich boy is freed from his coffin and hilarity ensues.

Dark Shadows is a re-interpretation of the TV show of the same name from the 1960’s and 1970’s.  Where the TV show was a melodramatic soap opera, the movie is a dark comedy.  The move from melodrama to comedy was done very well, with very little slapstick or overt attempts to get a laugh.  Most of the comedy is of  the “fish out of water” category, which Americans have enjoyed since Rip van Winkle woke up.  The movie is set in a remote Maine fishing village in the early 1970’s, and the visuals of both the town, the surrounding area, and the Collins mansion are excellent.  The Maine coast is shown as not much more than high cliffs, sharp rocks, pine trees, and pounding waves.  The town itself is plastered with retro advertisements, old cars, and even has a full service gas station.  The mansion is a gloomy, dusty place, which is the perfect setting for a Tim Burton film.

Johnny Depp plays the main character, Barnabus Collins, and he is joined by a very well-put together ensemble of actors, including Michelle Pfeiffer as his great-to-the-power-of-n grand-niece.  Her character, Elizabeth, is the matriarch of the family and, along with her brother, Roger, is the sole remaining adult Collins.  There are two children in the family mansion: Elizabeth’s daughter Carolyn, a rebellious twit of a teenage girl, and Roger’s son David, a young boy whose mother died in a boating accident and is having ‘trouble’ admitting that she is gone.  Helena Bonham Carter plays Dr. Hoffman, a psychiatrist who is living with the Collins  family to treat David.  Eva Green plays Angelique Bouchard, the vengeful witch who cursed Barnabus in the 1700’s and has been picking off his family for two centuries.  The part of the ‘innocent’ Victoria Winters, who is the spitting image of Barnabus’ dead love from the 1700’s, is played by Bella Heathcote.

The plotting and timing of the story was very well paced.  The movie comes in at almost exactly two hours, and I wasn’t bored in any of it.  It’s not an action movie by any means, but the acting and story were good enough that I didn’t lose interest.  One quibble I had was that the movie is set in Maine, but exactly one minor character had a Maine accent.  That kind of threw me at times, but didn’t detract too much from my enjoyment of the film.  I contrast that with Johnny Depp doing a pretty good impression of an English gentleman’s accent.  Basically, take a lot of the Keith Richards out of Jack Sparrow and sent him to Eton, and you have his rendition of Barnabus Collins.

The original score for the movie was done by Danny Elfman, who has also worked with Tim Burton on multiple occasions.  His score didn’t have any of the bouncy nature a lot of his earlier movie music had.  Instead it better fit the understated, dark atmosphere of the movie.  The other music in the film was appropriate for the time period of the story, 1972.  It included Elton John, The Carpenters, and Alice Cooper.

The movie has that Tim Burton “slightly odd” feel to it, but it’s not laid on as thick as a lot of his other works, and it plays nicely with the original melodramatic storyline.  There are several things that I saw watching Dark Shadows that I was able to say “That comes out of Beetlejuice” or something similar, but they were subtle and didn’t detract from the film.

Overall, I’d say that Dark Shadows is definitely worth the price of admission, but will probably be overshadowed by The Avengers and other summer blockbusters.  The showing we went to, on the opening night of the film, was about 3/4 full, and the audience tended towards an older crowd.  There were a few teenagers and 20-somethings, but not enough to make this one a runaway hit financially.  That would be a shame, as the film ended in such a way that would make a sequel very easy to do.  It might have benefited from a release in the fall, which would have dove-tailed nicely with Halloween.

If you enjoyed the original TV show or the first Addams Family movie, you should enjoy this one.  I definitely recommend it.

Over the weekend, I stayed at the Millennium Hotel in Saint Louis.  This is a fairly modern hotel in downtown, close to the football and baseball stadiums, the convention center, and St. Louis’s riverfront.  Here are my thoughts on the hotel and my stay there:

Pro’s

• Location – It was a 15 minute walk from the convention center and football stadium, a few minutes away from Busch Stadium, and you have a magnificent view of the Gateway Arch and the Mississippi River from the rear of the hotel.  The downtown district has a plethora of excellent restaurants and bars.  Parking for the hotel is convenient in either the front of the hotel or across the street in a garage.
• Staff – I found the staff to be friendly, efficient, and helpful.  The wait staff in the bar got a little behind on the two nights I went there for drinks and food, but they were trying to serve a large group of gunbloggers, NRA members, and baseball fans.  The shuttle driver we used when it was raining on Saturday was the nicest person I met in Saint Louis who wasn’t specifically there for the convention.
• Cleanliness and Upkeep – The hotel was spotlessly clean, even in high traffic areas such as the lobby.  The hotel had a few blemishes in wall paper and drywall, and the stairwell in the north tower needed a good cleaning.
• Food – The food in the bar and the downstairs restaurant was excellent. I suggest trying the toasted ravioli.  I’m told that’s a local St. Louis delicacy.
• Comfort – The rooms, and beds in particular, were very comfortable.  The lobby has several sets of chairs and couches for getting small groups together.  In the morning, a small Starbucks coffee booth is open, allowing you to read the newspaper and have your $2.00 cup of coffee while sitting in a comfy chair.

Con’s

• Cost – Dennis from Dragon Leatherworks and I shared a room, and our price was a special rate for the NRA Annual Meeting.  I checked the plate on the door of our room, and the advertised price for a small room with two double beds was $279 per night.  For a nice hotel in the downtown district of a large city, I’d say that’s about par for the course.  However, the hotel provided precisely nothing other than the room for that money.  Internet access, telephone, and breakfast were not included, and were quite pricey.  The wired network in the room cost $15 a day to use.  According to the guest services book, utilizing the phone in the room would have cost $1.20 for the first minute, with a charge for each additional minute afterwards.  Breakfast in the hotel was excellent, but cost $15.95 per person.  Maybe I’m spoiled, but I’ve paid much less for a hotel room and gotten complimentary Internet access and hot breakfast.  Parking at the hotel garage was also not complimentary.
• Size of the room – Like I said, the room was small.  There was a small desk for working, if you either paid for the Internet access or had a cellular modem, but that was about the extent of the excess space.  If I had been travelling with a family and needed a roll-out bed for a child, it would have been very tight.
• Hot Water – We stayed three nights, and I had a lukewarm shower two of three mornings.  At first, I thought it might be caused by my inability to work the all-in-one faucet in the shower, but the hot water was also absent in the sink.  Inquiries to the front desk were not fruitful.  I’d like to note here that I have not been in a hotel without adequate hot water since the last time I was in Eastern Europe.
• Pool/Jacuzzi – The hotel has a nicely furnished workout room, but both the indoor and outdoor pools were closed and covered by a tarp.  No whirlpool was evident, which would have been nice after walking the floor at the convention center all day.

 Overall, I’d say that the Millennium would be a good place to stay if you are coming into town for a one night stay, such as to see a baseball or football game, and just want a nice, safe, clean hotel to sleep in after leaving the stadium.  If you are a business traveller and will be in town for several days, you might get better value elsewhere.