Category: Knowledge

The Favorite Alcoholic Beverages of 10 American Presidents

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Based on this list, only William McKinley liked an unusual (and quite potent) drink. My biggest surprise: Teddy Roosevelt had a reputation as a rugged, manly guy. I picture him as a “whisky, neat” kind of guy. Who knew he was an umbrella-drink pussy like me?

Many other Presidents, among those not mentioned here, liked to tipple:

Franklin Pierce was possibly our drunkest President. He was a notorious drunkard in his young days, then abstained for years until his son died, whereupon he really started hitting the bottle. Pierce’s opponents derided him with phrases like “the Hero of Many a well-fought bottle.” He died of cirrhosis of the liver.

Grover Cleveland drank about a half dozen beers every day, presumably non-consecutively.

Tricky Dick Nixon was known to get drunk in the evening and start feeling sorry for himself.

Martin Van Buren drank vast amounts of whiskey, but people said that he never seemed drunk. His nickname was Blue Whiskey Van.

James Buchanan, Chester Alan Arthur and Ulysses S. Grant were also big boozers. (Grant’s drinking was a source of one of Lincoln’s wittiest remarks. When people accused then-General Grant of being a drunk, Lincoln’s rejoinder was, “Find out what brand of whiskey he drinks, so that I can send a barrel of it to each of my other generals”)

George W. Bush, James K. Polk and Andrew Johnson sort of belong in their own category

Dubya always seemed drunk and confused, but he had actually become a teetotaler at least a decade before he was elected. As a young man, he reportedly consumed a wide variety of drinks and drugs. He was therefore both a heavy drinker and a teetotaler, like Franklin Pierce. In Bush’s case, sobriety won. In Pierce’s case, the bottle won.

Andrew Johnson was not a heavy drinker in general, but he was drunk at his own inauguration, which is pretty gangster.

Polk was not reputed to be a teetotaler (he drank wine now and then), but he forbade serving alcohol at the White House.

The following Presidents were known to be teetotalers:

Benjamin Harrison

Millard Fillmore

Rutherford B. Hayes

William H. Taft

Joe Biden

Donald J. Trump

The others were moderate drinkers.

Some of their favorite beverages are mentioned in the linked article. Others are known as well:

Harry Truman liked an occasional bourbon.

FDR liked brandy.

Gerald Ford liked an occasional gin and tonic.

Andrew Jackson preferred whiskey.

The complete Epstein “Birthday Book” has emerged

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Predictably, the White House has denied that Trump made his contribution, even though his signature it is a perfect match for other letters he wrote in that era.

I looked through the book. (Briefly. Who has time for this crap?) Trump is also mentioned at least one other time. There is a picture of one of those giant novelty checks made out to Epstein for $22,500 and listing Trump as the person making the payment. (It’s not signed. His name is written in block CAPS.) “Jeffrey showing early talents with money + women! Sells ‘fully depreciated’ [woman’s name redacted] to Donald Trump for $22,500.” That’s some kind of lewd joke, and is impossible to interpret without knowing the context or whether the woman was in on the joke, but I’m sure that the internet nutbags will draw all sorts of sinister inferences and make plenty of wild-eyed claims.

Other people who made a contribution to the book include Alan Dershowitz and Bill Clinton.

Frankly, I have no idea why people think this is important, and I also have no idea why Trump would deny it. It’s ribald, but the words could have any number of interpretations, and I may have written similarly enigmatic crap when asked by my friend’s wives to do something for surprise parties.

I can remember one I did for a guy’s 50th birthday. I wrote: “I was supposed to say something good about Dick. Well, um, well there’s … um … there’s … oh, yeah … as I recall, he was a better-than-average speller.” The point is, when under the gun, what do you write when asked about things like this? The thing that Epstein and Trump had in common was that they were horndogs. They were also friends. Appropriately, the letter is both bawdy and affectionate. No surprise there. If anything, it shows Trump to be capable of friendship and affection. Who knew?

For the record, I think that message is much too clever to have been written by Trump. Would he have created an imaginary dialogue? Would he have been subtle and cryptic? I don’t think those arrows are in his quiver. The man is not exactly Eugene O’Fucking Neill. I assume he told an underling to “create something appropriate” and he just signed it.

The Onion’s take: “Trump Claims He Can’t Be Expected To Remember Every Birthday Card He Sends To Child Molesters”

The complete Birthday Book can be read or downloaded here. (It is “Request No. 1.pdf”)

“Orcas are a natural predator to moose.”

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That item came from this list: 25 Facts That Sound Like Huge Lies, But Are Actually True

Most of these articles with click-bait headlines contain items that are obvious, or half-truths, or outright misinformation, but since this item caught my attention, I looked it up, and it is true.

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The unusual predator-prey relationship occurs where the habitats of the ocean-dwelling orcas and the land-dwelling moose intersect along the Pacific coast.
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Moose are excellent, strong swimmers that frequently traverse saltwater between islands to forage for aquatic plants.
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Pods of orcas will take advantage of these opportunities, preying on and killing moose when they encounter them in the water.

The Nudity in Münchhausen (1943)

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In this fantasy, Baron Münchhausen is an immortal whose travels through time and space are recounted in a series of flashbacks.

This 1943 film is exceptional in several ways:

First, it is a technical masterpiece. The sets and the color photography are as good as or better than any films from the same era being produced in Britain or the USA, including even The Wizard of Oz and The Thief of Baghdad. The recently remastered 4K version is spectacular.

Second, it was begun at the height of Nazi Germany’s military successes, ordered by Joseph Goebbels himself. It was written by a Jewish man, Erich Kästner, but his name was banned from the credits.

Third, the Arabian portion of the film contains nudity, in an era when naked flesh was verboten across the Atlantic. Here is the relevant portion of the film. Sample capture below.


image host

The film’s premiere in March 1943 ran 134 minutes. A re-censored version was released just three months later with a runtime of 118 minutes, with changes presumably ordered by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda to expunge controversial aspects of the film. The restored 4K “export version” (available for free here) is shorter still, running 116 minutes. The German Blu-Ray has all three versions (134 premiere, 118 later theatrical, 116 export version). I have not seen the longer versions and don’t know what is in the other 18 minutes.

If anyone has seen the premiere version, please tell the rest of us what the differences are.

A quick note on Texas redistricting

Scoop, ... 71 comments.

Just some essential facts which have not been reported amid the partisan bickering:

In 2024, President Trump received 56% of the popular vote in Texas. Republican congressional candidates did a bit better, with 58%. If the electoral map were created so that all votes were approximately of equal weight, Republicans would have won 22 of the 38 Texas seats in the U.S. House of Representatives

Republicans actually won 25 of the 38 seats (66%) thanks to creative redistricting. Democrats are thus underrepresented by three seats relative to the actual number of Democratic voters. The new Republican plan is designed to give them 5 more seats, raising them to 30 out of 38 (79%) of the seats from 58% of the voters.

Texas is not unique in this lack of proportion, and Republicans are not the only ones to benefit from it. Democrats won 77% of the seats in California, although they received 60% of the votes.

If you look at the percentages in the two paragraphs above, you’ll see that the new Texas plan (79% of seats from 58% of voters) is not at all out of line with California (77% seats from 60% of voters.)

Looking at California another way:

5.928 million Republican voters get 12 House seats – one seat for every 494,000 voters.
9.138 million Democrat voters get 40 house seats – one seat for 228,000 voters

California Republicans are 39.23% of the state, which means they would get 20 of the 52 House seats if the seats were allocated proportionally. In reality, they get 12. In the mind of Republicans, this means they are getting cheated out of 8 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, and they try to make that up elsewhere. In Texas, they would have 22 seats in a scenario of proportional representation, and the proposed redistricting is designed to produce 30 – that’s exactly the eight they need to offset the California factor.

Is the system “fair”? No. Is the whole system an exercise in deception? Yes. Texas is trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat. But that is the system, they are within their legal rights, and that system is here to stay for a while, so both parties will continue to pull every last rabbit of that crooked hat.

That brings us to the Texas Democrats trying to prevent the redistricting. They are drawing, and will continue to draw, attention to the issue, which is a good thing that might eventually lead to change, but I think they have less chance of success than Don Quixote had against those windmills.

20 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do

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When we baby boomers were kids, before the days of helicopter parents, we ran through this whole check list, more or less. One exception: my parents did NOT let me drive a car, but some of the kids who lived on farms did get to drive on their family’s land.

It was a different world. In the summer, from about age 9 or 10, I left the house on my bike at dawn and returned at dusk. That was typical in that era. My friend and I made a few bucks each day by scavenging for deposit bottles that people discarded at nearby picnic and amusement areas. A dollar bought a lot in those days – ten comic books or twenty packs of baseball cards.

I never forgot the top guy in the first pack of baseball cards I opened in 1958. That man, while still quite young, later turned out to be the baseball coach at my college. This was the card.

Gil was famous for two things:

1. He was the ultimate supersub. Casey assigned him to play wherever there might have been a weak spot, which means the Yankees of that era never really had a weak spot. McDougald led all American League infielders in double plays at three different positions – at third base (1952), at second base (1955) and shortstop (1957).

2. He hit the infamous line drive that nearly killed the rising Cleveland superstar Herb Score.

Score had been the rookie of the year with 16 wins, and followed that up with a 20-win season in his second season. He led the league in strikeouts both seasons. He was 23 years old. In early May of the next season, he was struck on the eye by McDougald’s liner, and that was essentially the end of his career. His lifetime ERA at the time was 2.63, lower than the lifetime figure for Whitey Ford or Sandy Koufax. He had struck out 9.6 batters per nine innings, compared to 9.3 for the great Koufax. Score seemed to have recovered in 1958 when he had a couple of good starts in April, but he tore a tendon in his left elbow early in the season, and the rest of his career consisted of aborted comebacks. He finally hung it up in 1963 after he went 0-6 with a 7.66 ERA – against poor competition in the minor leagues! He spent the next 30 years in the broadcast booth as a beloved Cleveland institution. His last game as announcer was the seventh game of the Indians’ World Series in 1997, when they came oh-so-close to a championship, losing a 3-2 heartbreaker in 11 innings.

Herb died in 2008. His best obit was written by … well, I believe it was me.

Gil died two years later. I’ll bet you can guess who authored the obit I’m linking to.