Things I Drink And So Should You: The Charles River Highball

It is Easter weekend, which is about the busiest my calendar gets every year. I have hardly had time to breathe this week, let alone read this blog, never mind contribute. The craziness of my schedule has even prevented me from doing that which I love most: watch sports and drink. And that all ends Sunday afternoon.

Every Easter, I throw a Resurrection Barbecue, where we throw some ham on the grill, dressed in our Sunday best, drinking beer and, more importantly, breaking out the greatest summer drink you’ve never had: The Charles River Highball.

The Charles River Highball is liquid summer. It is warm evenings on a porch with friends, the rhythms of a gentle breeze and the fading noise of a neighborhood getting ready to go out. It is walking through a park with your partner (or dog), feeling the sun on the back of your neck. It is sitting in the bleachers at a Little League game, cheering for some stranger’s kid, because if baseball is being played, it’s a sin to walk past without watching.

It’s also gin, ginger ale, orange juice and bitters, but like the 2010 West (By God) Virginia Mountaineers, it’s not the parts, but the whole that matters. I think this makes Bob Huggins, appropriately, the bitters — without them, this drink still works, but it doesn’t quite come together to blow your mind. Let the Dukes of the world have their vodka martinis, all shine and pomposity. Let the Butlers of the world have their Jack and Cokes, workmanlike and predictable. Let the Michigan States of the world die in a fire*. Give me a Charles River Highball, a drink that blends too many things together, looks like the polluted river it’s named after, but comes together as the worthy champion at the end of it all.

The drink, as the inventor crafts it:

Get a large pitcher and half-fill it with ice.

Cover the ice with gin (any gin works, but Hendricks gin brings it up an extra level)

Fill the rest of the pitcher with equal parts orange juice and ginger ale.

Pour on the bitters and stir slowly until it looks less FFFF and more FFCC**.

Drink it ’til it’s gone and make another, but now with equal parts gin, ginger ale and orange juice.

Be a champion.

Cheers.

* I hate Michigan State like Pop hates Glenn Beck, with a bemused fury.

** I will search the archives for an actual picture of one, but HTML geekery will have to suffice.

Chart of the day…

I’m a big lover of charts, so maybe I’ll try to make this a daily thing.  Anyway, here is the chart of the day, and possibly the year.  Via Yglesias

1,000 lawyers in a deep sea trench…

I think I’d like to make basketball the subject of my inaugural post. You see, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the negotiations leading up to agreeing on a new collective bargaining agreement. There a lot of points of contention, lots of issues to be hashed out, but the gist of it is that the owners are feeling pinched by decreased revenues owing to the recession, and are looking to cut their personnel costs. This, to sort of stop before I even start, is total nonsense, see here. But what’s interesting to me is the owner claim and proposed solution, not reality.

With a fairly fixed numbers of players per team cutting personnel costs primarily means convincing players to swallow lower salaries. In effect admitting that teams have not, through the usual means of negotiation, been able to control the compensation packages of their employees. The basic problem is that the existing soft salary cap system in the NBA allows teams to go over the salary cap in order to retain players already on the team. When it was initiated, this was meant to allow teams that had one way or another acquired a great team to keep it together. Unfortunately, in practice, it has meant that the teams’ middle management face a lot of pressure from their stakeholders, I mean fans, to hold on to their better players no matter what. Then the salaries for the rest of players are forced up by the inflated contracts.

That is to say that the purported problem, according to a bunch of corporate owners, is that they and a team of highly knowledgeable, motivated managers are incapable of making rational decisions about the compensation of their employees. So, what is the proposed solution? Well, what about a umbrella rule, a kind of financial regulation that would prevent the excessive  inflation of salaries by putting an absolute limit on player compensation per team?

Maybe you’ve seen where I’ve been going with this. There is, as it happens, another industry much in the news lately, where the compensation of the employees has famously gotten out of control. Except that whereas in the case of the NBA the players’ compensations have maybe contributed to a ugly financial situation for a couple of teams, in the banking industry, the compensation of inflation of employees salaries has at least continued in spite of the complete collapse of the industry, and quite possibly caused that collapse by a perversion of incentives. What’s the solution in the NBA? Regulation. But in the banking industry? Oh no, that would cause the FINANCIAPOCALYPSE!

Anyway…as that wasn’t really all that much about the NBA, I’ll just add that I don’t know how the hell this Dallas team happened. That’s just a monstrous team. I’m not the least bit surprised that they’re on a 13-game win streak, and for my money they’re the favorites to win the Championship now. I mean, we’re talking about a team that could plausible go big and put Dirk Nowitzki at SF or go small with him at the C and Shawn Marion at PF.