cocktail review no. 53 - Zombie

Apologies, apologies! I know I've missed a couple Thursdays. I'll explain later. My reading list has taken over my life, and I find myself once again searching for direction in an aimless world...but I digress. On with the review.

The Zombie happens to be one of my favorite cocktails, mainly because it has a weird name which it actually lives up to. This drink literally makes you feel like a zombie the morning after: headache, dry mouth, sluggish movements, bleary eyes, the works. Plus you want to rip anything that moves or makes noise into itty bitty shreds. This libation is better than anything crashing satellites or corrupt corporations could dish up.

Now, I actually have two different recipes for this. One is from the Bartender's Bible...

•  1 ounce light rum
• 1 ounce añejo rum
• 1 ounce dark rum
• ½ ounces apricot brandy
• 2 ounces orange juice
• 1 ounce pineapple juice
• 1 ounce lime juice
• 1 teaspoon superfine sugar
• 1 cup crushed ice
• 1 teaspoons 151-proof rum
• 1 orange slice
• 1 maraschino cherry
• 1 mint sprig

In a blender, combine the light rum, añejo rum, dark rum, apricot brandy, orange juice, pineapple juice, lime juice, and sugar with the crushed ice. Blend well at high speed. Pour into a collins glass. Float the 151-proof rum on top. Garnish with the orange slice, cherry, and mint sprig.

(Whew, that's quite some litany, ain't it?)

And this is the recipe I was taught in class, at National Bartenders in Riverside, California.

• 1 ounce Bacardi dark rum
• 1 ounce Bacardi light rum
• ½ ounce crème de almond
• ½ ounce triple sec
• 4 ounces sweet-and-sour mix
• 4 ounces orange juice
• ½ ounce Bacardi 151

In a hurricane glass half-filled with ice cubes, combine the dark rum, light rum, crème de almond, and triple sec. Pour equal measures of sweet-and-sour and orange juice until the glass is almost full. Float the 151-proof rum on top.

Now that's better. Simpler. Easy to remember. And you don't have the oddball ingredients which normally plague tropical drinks (what the molly hell is "orgeat syrup"?). There's pretty much crème de almond and that's it. I didn't have any on hand, so I substituted amaretto, which at least is almond-flavored, though made from apricot stones.

Now, as you may have noticed, there is a feckin' truckload of rum in this drink. Hence the title: this thing is bad for the head, the liver, and most of the rest of the body. Forget them Long Island iced teas. It doesn't matter how slowly you sip, the rum lights a fire in your belly, the 151 goes right to your head...and your braiiiinnnnnnnsssssss...

Okay, I'll lay off the undead references.

The major advantage the zombie has over its competitors is that it possesses distinct flavors. You can actually detect the rum. The taste is typical for a tropical drink, but not overwhelmingly fruity, like a Mai Tai or Chi Chi. Zombies have a predominant rummy undertow that sinks its teeth into you and won't let go. From the first bite to the last (so to speak), the rum courses through your veins, seeping into your tissues, rotting your flesh and impairing your motor functions.

Oh, right, sorry. I have to give up the zombie shop talk. Don't want to cause a mass panic...

Somehow, the combined effect of triple sec, sweet 'n' sour, orange juice and crème de almond produces a sweet, well-rounded, pleasant, generic sort of fruit flavor which mixes tremendously well with rum. Some might say that the National Bartenders recipe isn't as sophisticated as the Bible's, but superiority is largely a matter of taste in the cocktail world. There comes a time when you're mixing so many ingredients together that they just blend together into one unrecognizable blob. (See Dad's Rule of 3.) I dare you to mix the Bible's version and tell me you can taste the lime juice.

"What of it?" you may protest. "You're not supposed to taste it. The juices are intended to merge into a synergistic amalgam and be enjoyed thusly."

First of all, give yourself a swift kick in the ass. Nobody says "thusly" anymore.

Second, let me ask you this: if the juices are supposed to blend together, why do you need so many? Wouldn't you get along just as well without the lime juice as you would with it? Is the tiny, sour, citrusy kick the lime juice transmits really detectable amid all those pineapple and orange titans?

The school recipe might actually be the better of the two because it has fewer ingredients. It's a lot quicker to make, too, let me tell you.

Just by adding almond liqueur, sweet-and-sour, triple sec and orange juice, you can create a citrus-dominant, slightly nutty nectar which will marvelously complement the sweetness of the rum. It'll take all of your cares away. And probably make you stagger around and moan a bit, too.

Sometimes it is fun to spend thirty minutes hand-crafting a deliciously complicated cocktail. But that's a story for another day. For now, drink your zombie and don't stumble on your way out the door.

Northeast England's anti-zombie fortress

Technically it's a priory, but Adam has on numerous occasions declared his intention to employ the fortified ruins on top of the cliff in Tynemouth as his last refuge against the zombie apocalypse.

The story so far: We find our heroes walking out of the Priory Café late on the morning of June 14, having neatly consumed an entire English breakfast and about 25 servings of toast, which Adam ordered up special because he thought he'd have a lot of sauce to mop up, but which we somehow managed to consume. First things first. Before we ate we'd had to go to the tiny Tynemouth branch library and pay a few pence to print our flight itineraries for Dublin. We'd be leaving the next day on a Ryanair flight.

But that's a story for another time. Now we were going to see the seaside. On the agenda were the old priory; the North Sea; the Collingwood Monument; and Fish Quay, just three of Newcastle's cultural hot spots. The priory sits perched on a crag overlooking the stormy North Sea, and has existed in some form or other since the 7th century. Various orders passed through it before Henry the Eighth literally ripped the roof off the place in the sixteenth century. Then the elements came in and did their job, and the priory fell to ruins. The crag, and the remains of the priory, were commandeered as a gun position during the Second World War, and a coast guard station currently sits there. But the ruins still stand, and are a treat for the eyes and the historically-minded. So in we went.
(I wish I could remember what Jeff was pointing and laughing at here. Must've been a hoot.)

The Newcastle Priory would make a rather good zombie fortress. The drawbridge isn't there anymore, but the portcullis is two-inch-thick cast iron, and there's defensible space all around the gatehouse. There's little shelter from the elements but some creative engineering (and perhaps some really big tarps) would solve that. There's lots of open lawns inside, so growing vegetables wouldn't be a problem. The yards of walls provide plenty of room for snipers and defenders, and the gatehouse has multiple stories to rain death down upon undead attackers. There's no escape route (except the cliff and the sea), but hey, if they get through the walls, you might as well shoot yourself in the head anyway, 'cause there ain't a comparably safe place for miles.

Jeff, Andrea, Adam and I spent a happy hour wandering about, peering into the old chapel, craning our necks up to look at the ruins, staring down the sights of the enormous anti-ship guns on the cliff edge, reading the nigh-illegible missives on the headstones, and (in my case) sipping ginger beer.
Adam and Jeff just had to get their pictures taken with the cannon.
Well, okay, so did I.
Eat this, Hitler!
In the graveyard we saw memorials to ancient mariners and their families, who perished in the 1830s.
In the chapel we saw stained glass windows, surely not the originals from the 1300s, but enough to give a jolly good impression of what worship must've been like when the monks roamed the premises.
In the gatehouse we saw just how easy it'd be to drop a rock on the head of a charging Viking.
And from the ramparts of the castle walls we took in a marvelous view of the coast, the sea, and the town of Tynemouth.
To summarize, I enjoyed myself immensely. This was the first time I'd been to a (mostly un-restored) building that had stood for more than 1,000 years. I'd been to a few temples in Korea that were likely 500 or so, but most of the elder stuff ain't around anymore. This was quite humbling, to stand amid the crumbling edifice of a monastery that was six times as old as the country as I was born in. Think about that for a minute. Staggers the imagination, don't it?

NEXT UP : a dip in the North Sea. Don't miss it. The water was nine degrees Celsius. I'll tell you exactly how cold it was after this quick break.

zombie preparedness

There's a certain group of paranoid loonies out there who are promulgating the notion of "zombie contingency plans."

That there may be no speculation, I am one of them.

Beginning to gain credence outside of Max Brooks fan clubs, the ZCP is a set of protocols to be followed in the event of a zombie apocalypse. Simply put, it is a blueprint for personal survival. One has to have a plan if the worst should happen. If a top-secret mutative virus was released into the atmosphere, and 95% of the world's population was turned into slavering, mindless cannibals...

• What would you do?
• What supplies would you gather?
• Who would you team up with, or include in your survival group?
• Where would you go to take shelter?
• What would your long-term plans for the stabilization of the tattered remains of the human race (if any) be?

These blueprints are rather comprehensive. Most commence at the very first sign of trouble, within minutes of an undead outbreak, and continue in excruciating detail through the course of many years, incorporating any number of apocalyptic scenarios.

My personal plan, I'm told, is rather high-flown (literally, as you'll see) but still maintains some viable elements. Needless to say, it involves flying. What better place to escape when Earth is overrun by hordes of flesh-eating undead than the empty sky?

I'd like to be able to share the details of my ZCP with you, but some things are better left classified. Suffice it to say that the fulfillment of my plan goes something like this: there's me, and a hand-picked crew of hardy, trustworthy souls—fully equipped with firearms and bladed weapons, pillaged or otherwise. We're flying an Osprey, a Bell UH-1 or some other military-type craft (preferably capable of hovering or STOL). We spend our days moving between hidden weapon and supply caches, and hiring ourselves out as couriers or zombie-killers to conclaves of terrified landlubbers.

I don't know about you, but that blows every other zombie contingency plan I've ever heard out of the water. Most of my buddies all have land-based plans, which, in my opinion, have one fatal flaw: they're land-based. Zombies walk on land. To me, land doesn't sound like the best place to be when the scourge of the living dead arises. Zombies don't swim, either, but seeing as how they're undead, they can still infest shallow water. Only thing scarier than a zombie shambling toward you on a dark street is one reaching up from the bottom of a murky pond and grabbing the oars of your rowboat—or one of your appendages. Therefore, I would argue that life as an "aerial nomad," rotating through a series of secured caches, armed to the teeth, keeping mobile, is a more feasible idea.

This plan depends on well-maintained equipment and absolute readiness. To that end, I check on my equipment frequently, and update it or refurbish it as needs be. Last week I gave the multifarious components of my anti-zombie kit a going-over.

First I grabbed my machete and my single-bit axe out of the Jeep. Each of these implements was chosen with the utmost care. The machete is carbon steel, rather than stainless, which, though more susceptible to rust, does not flash brightly in the sunlight and alert potential enemies to my presence. I would've preferred a double-bit axe, but Pops has one in the tool shed, so as long as the house isn't completely overrun following the outbreak (which is unlikely; we're far removed from town, and zombies shamble at 1-2 miles per hour) I can run out there and grab it. The Jeep, though neither heavy nor as thick-skinned as a Ford F-350 or an Excursion, still has plentiful cargo space, and suitable 4WD capabilities to get me over most obstacles. It'll do for a start. Later on I can see about getting my hands on a Bradley Fighting Vehicle or an armored F-650.

Once inside the house, I opened my closet and took out my Louisville Slugger and my aluminum Easton. Both baseball bats would do some damage to a half-rotted skull at close quarters. Both have their plus sides and drawbacks. The Slugger is made of wood, but its reach is longer. The Easton is shorter but inestimably stronger. Wouldn't hurt to have both along. This being the United States, where guns are not irrationally viewed as being scary, violent or barbaric death-devices which wantonly kill people for no reason, I have several firearms in my arsenal as well. I would detail them here, but again, such things are better left unsaid. I will say that I am equipped for almost every conceivable scenario—and have more than enough ammunition to outlast the initial outbreak.


My machete and axe were in bad shape. Somehow, moisture had seeped into the back of my Jeep. (Yes, moisture. In the desert. Didn't have that in my contingency plan, oh no.) The blades of both tools were encrusted with rust. It took a fair amount of spit, polish, and steel wool to get it off, but I managed it. Dad helped a lot. He's good for stuff like that. I think I'll keep those (ahem) tools inside from now on, unless I really need to have them in my car.

If you must know, I didn't buy an axe and a machete expressly for zombie-fighting purposes. I actually wanted them for that inconceivable moment when I finally move to Alaska, and might need to clear fallen trees off the roads. Zombie-killing is an added bonus. A special feature, if you will. And so my anti-zombie kit has been revitalized for the nonce, and I am once again prepared to face the zombie plague, the end-all disaster. Hee hee.


Speaking of disasters, there was a slight earthquake as I was typing this post. I am not making this up. I live less than 50 miles from the San Andreas fault, so earthquakes are nothing new around here. I was just sitting on my bed, typing, when all of a sudden I felt the mattress begin to sway ever so slightly beneath me. There was some relative motion being achieved between the elbows on my knees, and the hands on my keyboard.

I jumped up and yelled "HEY GUYS! I THINK WE'RE HAVING AN EARTHQUAKE!"

No sooner did I reach the living room when Mom hollered "YEAH WE ARE!"

I felt the carpet sway to and fro under my feet. I was like riding the most gentle surfboard in the world. The light bulbs in the ceiling fan began to rattle, and I could see the clock on the mantelpiece (suspended by a thin wire) wobble back and forth. Dad—the geologist in the family—sat at the computer, grinning.

"Hey," he said, "This is a good one!"

It continued for perhaps 15 more seconds. We looked out the front window to try and see the ground wave moving down the hill, but the quake was too gentle for that. Finally, it died away.
"Somebody got really hammered somewhere," Pop mused, a little while later. "That was a good one."

The weights on the cuckoo clock still swung back and forth.

Dad was right. The earthquake turned out to be a 7.2 on the Richter scale that struck Baja California about 29 miles south of Mexicali. It took place six miles beneath the surface. Haven't heard too much about the damage it caused. But we felt it all the way up here. Yowzer.

This is perhaps the eighth or ninth earthquake I've experienced here in the Mojave. Three of them I've driven through, and haven't noticed. One of them rattled a few tools in the garage, but I couldn't feel it. Another woke me up in the middle of the night, making me think my box-spring mattress had mutated into a water bed. The rest were so gentle that I didn't detect them. Normally, earthquakes don't last as long as this one today; they just roll through, like a wave.

That could change in the near future, though. Southern California is about ten years overdue for a truly massive quake, the proverbial Big One, a 2012-style monster that'll level every overpass in the Los Angeles Basin and (hopefully) put Malibu and Santa Barbara underwater for the rest of eternity. I think I might go buy a crash helmet tomorrow. And a video camera.

Wouldn't that make an interesting vlog entry?

recommended reading

Boy, it's been a while since we did one of these, hasn't it?

When last we spoke, I was in the middle of Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu and World War Z, by Laurence Bergreen and Max Brooks respectively. There is little more I can say about these two works that I have not already said previously, mainly because I haven't finished the Polo book (it's been buried in the bottom of my suitcase since late June) and the zombie book continued in largely the same vein that I delineated to you before. That is to say, excellent, poignant and mind-blowing.

Now on to the real meatballs in the batter: Ice Hunt by James Rollins, The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, Candide by Voltaire, and All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. I couldn't wait until I hit the flight deck. I cracked Ice Hunt the first day in Jeju. I finished it a couple of days later. I won't deny that it was a cheap sci-fi adventure novel, but hey, James Rollins really knows his trade. It was a gripping book, to say the least. Russian intrigue, submarine warfare, assassination attempts in Arctic Alaska, plenty of shootouts and dubious vehicular stunts, sabotage, lost ice stations, top-secret human experimentation, blizzards, explosions, and long-dead monsters reawakened from a frozen tomb; let's just put it that way. Rollins somehow does something I am deathly afraid I won't be able to do: create a complex and intriguing plot, populated with dozens of fascinating secondary characters. The various tendrils of this plot all coordinate seamlessly with one another and build toward a truly heroic and spectacular climax. I could learn a thing or two from this. This book (perhaps) also holds the dubious distinction of being the first and only adventure novel to use Ambulocetus as a bad guy.

Far more terrifying than this picture makes it seem.

I didn't open another book until I got home. My seat on Flight 63 from Tokyo was so cramped and uncomfortable that I didn't want to read in case the unfavorable circumstances somehow tarnished my perception of the book's content. That happens to me a lot, you know. I need conditions that are conducive to contemplative perusal; otherwise, not only will I not be able to concentrate, but I will forever associate the book in question with such unfavorable circumstances. Once home, however, after a hard day of job hunting, I picked up The Three Musketeers and started in on it. I was now floored by Alexandre Dumas's writing ability. He, like Rollins, is able to invent a complex plot with dozens of supporting characters and resolve the various plot lines into a cohesive and satisfactory ending (and an emotional one to boot). However, Dumas has also created no less than four three-dimensional, entertaining protagonists (I think you know which four I'm referring to). Moreover, Dumas really knows how to set up an engaging storyline quickly. Within the first few pages, he had introduced me to young D'Artagnan and started that young lad out upon his grand romantic adventure, with nothing more than a few écus, a tatterdemalion horse, and his father's sword...thereby getting me hooked on the story immediately.

That story is classic. D'Artagnan meets his three future best buddies under less-than-ideal circumstances upon arriving in Paris. In fact, he winds up challenging each one of them to a duel. However, a hostile encounter with the scheming Cardinal Richelieu's men interrupts their clash, unites them, and makes them fast friends. There follows a swashbuckling series of sorties, swordfights, quests, rallies, marches, missions and information-gathering, culminating in...well, I won't spoil it. Suffice to say, I highly recommend both Ice Hunt and The Three Musketeers.

The candy bar's not bad, either.

Next was Candide, by Voltaire. It's one of the oddest books I've ever read. First of all, it's only 85 pages. Moreover, it has about sixty chapters, each of which is usually only one or two pages long. It's a quick read. It was also one of the most merciless, blatant, overt works of satire I've ever read. Voltaire skewers everything from philosophy to science to international politics (and takes shots at his detractors along the way). All of this is couched in rather extreme situational comedy...an elderly midwife who was once a princess until she was captured by Turks and had one of her buttocks cut off; Candide himself, the hapless protagonist, who winds up getting his skin whipped completely off before discovering El Dorado; Dr. Pangloss, Candide's mentor, who despite nearly dying of leprosy, being kicked out of his homeland by an invading army, getting improperly hanged in a foreign land, narrowly escaping drowning during a shipwreck and witnessing countless instances of depravity and tyranny during his travels, keeps insisting that "everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds."

"If this world is the best," Candide unsurprisingly wonders, "what about the others?"

I shan't divulge the various trials and tribulations Candide endures in his travels around Europe, Asia Minor, and the New World in search of his lady love, Cunegonde, nor the interesting folk he meets on his way. I'll merely say that, in the end, Candide does discover what's best in life. And it's not crushing your enemies, driving them before you, and hearing the lamentation of their women, either. That was Voltaire's aim in writing this little work: to show up the petty, grandstanding, overbearing nature of humanity's political, religious, and carnal concerns. Perhaps all of them can be replaced with something far simpler...?

Having completed these three doughty volumes, I then progressed to All Quiet on the Western Front. In terms of sheer writing ability, I think Erich Maria Remarque outstrips a good 95% of all the authors I've ever read. His story of German boys fighting a bloody, soul-scarring war that's not their own is one of the most powerful pieces of literature I've ever touched. That's no understatement. This book isn't called the best war novel of the 20th century for nothing. Remarque paints a vivid, gruesome picture of the front. His depiction of life behind the lines, at times bawdy, silly, bleak, poor, and toilsome, is no less gritty (in every sense of the word). In a time of bombastic patriotism and international pride, Remarque dares to stand up and challenge the paradigm with his brutally honest account of heartrending loss of life and innocence. The tragedy of war, and the sure destruction of even those who survived, are revealed on no uncertain terms, drawn in simple descriptive phrases and the most frugally eloquent prose I've seen in a long while. It's a thousand times more accessible than The Red Badge of Courage and a thousand times less pretentious than Johnny Got His Gun. Though the word "masterpiece" gets chucked around meaninglessly nowadays, this book fits the bill.

I'm working through a literary self-help book, too (How to Write a Damn Good Novel, by James N. Frey), and some historical reference books to succour my novel (Antiquity by Norman F. Cantor and A Short History of the World by Geoffrey Blainey) but I'm too superficially involved as yet to offer a useful opinion. I have no idea what I'll read next (for fun). So stay tuned...

recommended reading

That Marco Polo book has picked up a little since last I wrote. Take this, for example:

Combining a market and a brothel, Quinsai also had the air of a perpetual carnival. One memoirist who came of age there never forgot the man who trained his fish to perform. He has a large lacquer bowl in front of him in which swim turtles, turbots, and other fish. He beats time on a small bronze gong and calls up one of the creatures by name. It comes immediately and dances on the surface, wearing a kind of little hat on its head...There is also an archery expert who sets up in front of the spectators a big wheel a yard and a half in diameter, with all sorts of objects, flowers, birds, and people painted on it. He announces that he is going to hit this or that object, and having started spinning it rapidly, he shoots his arrows through the midst of the spectators. He hits the exact spot he has declared he will hit. He can even score a hit on the most precisely defined spots of the spinning target, such as a particular feather in a particular wing of a bird. The memoirist wandered in a daze among snake charmers blowing on little pipes, luring their hideous charges from the bamboo baskets where they coiled in darkness; and a Taoist monk who carried a trap filled with multicolored shellfish, which he claimed he had hypnotized. Boxers abounded, as did chess players, poets, writers of light verse, acrobats, and magicians. A Chinese record of the era lists five hundred and fifty-four performers who appeared at court, grouped into fifty-five categories, including kite flyers and ball players, magicians and singers, impressionists, artists, and bawdy raconteurs.

Before I came to the above passage, unfortunately, I lost patience, decided to take a break and got into something a little more digestible (no pun intended): World War Z, by Max Brooks. Touting itself as "an oral history of the zombie war," the book is just that: a series of accounts, collected by a nameless journalist (presumably Brooks himself). They are from all over the world, from China (where the outbreaks initially began), India, the U.S., Russia, and obscure spots and outlying regions all over the globe. I won't go into too much detail lest I (a) divulge the finger, cliffhanging points of the plot, or (b) disgust you by revealing myself to be a zombie apocalypse fan (not necessarily zombie apocalypse movie fan, mind you; the concept will do fine). I would like to impress upon you, however, just how realistic the book is, in both discussion of the spread of the virus or contagion or whatever it is, and also in the reaction of the world at large, on both small and large scales. Brooks accurately predicts, with borderline cynicism, the disbelieving attitudes of the people and the inept and dilatory nature of government response. Nor does his anthropic prowess stop there. He also realistically portrays the actions of individuals and governments after the disaster has been acknowledged, in both regrouping and combating the sweeping pandemic. Beyond that, though, the book itself is satisfactorily chilling. There's this one part where a Chinese sub has taken refuge on the seabed, right at crush depth, and begins to hear strange scraping and banging noises on its hull. A look through the periscope reveals legions of the undead, staggering across the ocean floor, clambering all over the submarine's hull, clawing to get inside and devour the crew.

Brooks has taken a more in-depth look at long-term undead residence on Earth and come to some heretofore unsuspected conclusions. He suggests that zombies, having no need for light or oxygen and being impervious to most pressure-related maladies, would be able to exist indefinitely underwater, even crossing oceans on foot. Brooks also puts forth the logical idea that, in extreme northern and southern latitudes, zombies would freeze solid in winter (those that wander about outdoors and are exposed to the elements) and thaw in spring, renewing their menace. I can only suggest that you read the work yourself and see what a suspenseful writer Brooks is, how thoroughly he has researched his ideas, and just what a compelling vision of planet Earth under siege by its own zombified populace would be seen through his eyes.

Apart from that, I have little to report. I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of my in-flight reading list (the books I'll use to assuage the epic boredom prevalent on transoceanic international journeys aboard flying sardine cans). I was without the benefit of unread literature during my last hop across the Pacific Ocean and have determined never to be so again; much less this trip, which should add up to be no less than 11 hours, likely more.

To that end, I have ordered, as my last request from What the Book?:

• The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
• Candide by Voltaire
• Ice Hunt by John Rollins
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

There you go, two classic novels of a martial nature, a scathing work of philosophy, and a two-bit adventure story. Boredom ought to be completely subverted.