Sorry, things are messy here right now.

I'm in the process of moving this blog over to Movable Type. Hold on. URL forthcoming.

Today is the 50th anniversary of Irish Coffee's invention.

Saw this article this morning.

I knew about the drink having been invented at the Buena Vista in San Francisco -- used to work across the street from the Buena Vista years ago. But I had no idea before that there was on record an actual date of inspired mixology.

So, in tribute, I popped out to the corner store, bought a bottle of Irish whiskey, and made this little celebratory beverage "still life" pictured here:

A little Irish coffee and a little trivia is a pleasant way to start the morning (as long as I do not instead dwell on everything else that I noticed in the news this morning, that is).

Hmm. Three or four of these drinkies could probably aid me quite well in not dwelling. But as tempting as that sounds, can't indulge in that as I've got some other things to attend to today. Drat. And more drat.

As for any tendency towards dwelling, I could try to follow the advice of one of Oscar's lines:

"Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain."

But I'm not sure I could believe that wholeheartedly without really, really dwelling on it. Not to mention a whole lot more whiskey in my coffee ...

But what the hell. I'll take a stab at it this minute.

Joyous Irish Coffee Day. Cheers!

uh-huh.

A couple of years back, I wrote an article for Suffering is Hip called BATS: A Personal Essay on the Order Chiroptera with Parenthetical Tangents.

If you've seen that article already, you might remember that part of the article includes a few bits of trivia about bats, including a mention that the US Postal Office had never issued a postage stamp featuring bats (although they regularly put all sorts of other species on stamps). This piece of trivia I'd originally found in a detailed article about bats on postage stamps in the Spring 1999 issue of Bats, Bat Conservation International's member publication.

Well, recently I found out that the US Postal Office has now issued a commemorative edition picturing American Bats on stamps. The edition, released just this September, has four different stamp designs with four different species of bats featured.

Sooooo, if the idea of being able to have bats on your postage stamps gives you a special little tingle, well, see the US Post Office's website for details.

I usually pay little attention to what's on my postage stamps as I'm usually just lucky to scrounge up a stamp in my mess when I need one that actually happens to have the correct postage according to current rates. So, I don't much tend to care what's pictured on it as long as it's still usable without having to also try to scrounge up any 1-cent and 2-cent stamps that I might or might not still have as well.

But I even broke down and bought some of these bat stamps. Just had to.

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