For The Love Of Port

<snip> (w/ no commercials for Peter's sake) <snip It really makes it or breaks it for me. ...American Idol. Ok, we all have a fault. [foilhat.gif] These are called "Guilty Pleasures" and we all have them. I tend to watch old Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan movies when feeling the need for some...

I can't watch anything with commercials, even the self-commercials on public TV. Ultimately I have to buy the DVD(s) and watch it at home. (This also gets me good sub-titles, as I am getting fairly deaf.) That said, I have enjoyed the Serenity/Firefly series, Buffy/Angel (parallel series), Game of T...

Yep; snopes.com (and several other urban legend/hoax sites) are excellent places to check out these "too cool to be true" stories. Almost any questionable item you run across can be researched by searching for it with the word [ hoax ] appended. But I repeat: pretty funny. Whether they are...

Pretty funny, but are these real Darwin Awards? My understanding is that to get a Darwin Award the recipient has to render him/herself incapable of reproducing (usually by death). By that criteria, only #1 qualifies. Also, the Ann Arbor News quit publishing over 5 years ago if I recall correctly, so...

There certainly were a lot of crystal decanters listed, but these (for the same product, but from two different sellers) were on the first page when I Googled [ decanter drying crystals ]. It is essential to type that final "s" and hit return to avoid the suggested singular, which indeed d...

A quick google on [ decanter drying crystals } finds Bed Bath & Beyond, as well as WineEnthusiast.com carrying such devices in the US (plus many more).

... the lumbar support and head rest both hit me in the wrong place. No worries. When looking up the standard seat width I noticed that the trend is to seats with NO lumbar support. This will allow them to make the seats lighter and THINNER thus allowing an even shorter pitch (distance center to ce...

What I dislike about airlines, is feeling like I'm being nickel-and-dimed. I'd actually prefer that IF (big big if) the base price was reasonable enough. I could see a fully unbundled pricing structure: a base price for the seat, a tariff for weight (personal and luggage wherever it is stowed), a t...

While I sympathize with a lot of your statements, I'd have to say that no included bags is as unfair as included checked bags. I'm 130 pounds, so by your logic (extended) I should either get a cheaper ticket or be able to check a case of wine for the same price the guy who weighs 180 is flying for ...

Not fair, since I don't actually fly, but: If I flew, I could turn the gripes about charging for checked baggage (and any rise in abuse of carry-on rules) on its head. I could object to being charged extra for my ticket when I DON'T have a checked bag if the cost of a single (or any other number of)...

I will say this. If you are intent on watching Life of Pi , you should definitely try it in an HD version. It is visually very rich and I was glad we were watching on Blu-ray. Not BluRay, but 1080p on a 120" projection screen. It was spectacular. I have since watched it again, and the second t...

Can't help with local port fanciers, but can sympathize about the unexplained "deserts" of broadbandlessness. My daughter recently visited form the wilds of mid-Michigan ( [shok.gif] ) and brought all of her computers and portables in order to do all her upgrades. She in on Satellite, but ...

We like Rieslings here, but we prefer the tarter varieties. What used to be QMP Kabinett (they recently changed the wine labeling laws in Germany, so it's something else now). To me a good Riesling tastes very much like a Granny Smith apple. We don't drink all that much Riesling any more, but when w...

I've always wanted to try this, but never had the nerve to do so. I even have a calvary sabre that I got in an antiques shops 20 years ago. :roll: It is pretty tough on the edge. If that saber is worth anything, you might check to see if the back edge of the blade has a sharp corner. If so, that wi...

Eric Menchen wrote:You didn't throw the glasses forcefully into the fireplace, shattering them?

I did that once. It wasn't as much fun as I thought it would be.


EDIT: I felt kind of stupid afterwards, and it detracted from what we were actually celebrating.

The car and drunk-driving laws. Needing a car to get around, and not being able to risk getting caught with even very small amounts of alcohol in the blood seriously reduces the amount of time in any given week when it is safe to drink wine. Noticed in France (and specifically about wine) where wine...

I know the feeling (and the requirement to buy more to make a set). I hope you did better than I usually do. I usually discover that the "free" items are not as good as they might be. And if you are talking about those "bottom sippers", I can't imagine how you ever made yourself ...

Watched Life Of Pi (2012). I'm not sure what we were expecting, but this wasn't it. I can sort of see where the Oscars came from, but maybe it was just a bit disturbing. We will be showing it again next Monday for our weekly MNATM showing. Maybe a second viewing (with all the disturbing parts blunte...

Wine Enthusiast does carry a decanter cleaning "brush". It looks and feels like a long bendable bottle brush with the bristles made of some spongey material. It can be bent to bring a bit of pressure to almost any spot in any shape of decanter. (They also make wineglass cleaning brushes of...

Years ago I had one (a Warre's Nimrod) that was so slightly corked that it really needed a good bottle side-by-side to be sure of it. Needless to say, I drank it anyway, although Eva preferred the tawny from the "good" bottle. Compared to other ports, and indeed to other wines, it seems to...