Beersicles, Mafia wine & other developments in potent potables

Is there any food that’s not improved by adding the words “on a stick”? Once a food has been sticked the only remaining improvement is “deep-fried in batter.” Well, a chef at Rustico’s in DC has gotten beer half-way there. He put a beer in the freezer to get it cold quickly and then forgot about it. The brew froze solid and he ended up eating his booze instead of drinking it. Now the place is sticking a stick in it and selling them. Reports are they are quite popular. You first.

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What with the recent demise of Mr. Soprano and America’s obsession with fictional mobsters, it is not surprising that someone has created a Mob-branded wine. What is surprising is that it is an anti-mafia branded wine.

Campo Libero, which means Free Field, is a lightly sparkling white wine made from Trebbiano grapes , and the brainchild of a teetotal charity worker. Dario Campagna, whose Il Gabbiano (“The Seagull”) association provides jobs for drug addicts and former prisoners, has taken advantage of an Italian law that allows property belonging to convicted gang bosses to be used for “social purposes”.

Campagna has taken to growing the grapes for the wine on land formerly owned by Francesco Schiavone, a boss in the Naples mafia.

“At the beginning, local farmers that we’d asked for advice kept missing appointments,” Mr Campagna explained. “But then we discovered that one of Schiavone’s relatives was living nearby and people were simply scared of having anything to do with us.”

Last year someone cut the wires holding up the vines causing Campagna’s group to lose half their crop.

The vines were replanted. And now 10,000 bottles of vino bianco are waiting to be drunk. “I don’t drink alcohol but those that have tasted Campo Libero say it’s a solid wine,” Mr Campagna said.

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Everyone knows that alcohol can lead to ill-fated romance, now a French vintner is hoping the interweb will remove the ill-fated part of the equation.

The ‘Soif de Coeur’ (A Thirst for Romance) bottles of rosé, red or white wine contain a unique code in their labels that you tap into the website in the hope of finding your perfect match.

Go to the site, type in your age, sex and the sex of the person you would like to meet and the site will link you up with someone who also bought a bottle of the wine and registered on-line. And there’s no risk that you will ever be asked to appear in one of those creepy eHarmony ads.

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Not only can you drink yourself into the gutter, now you can advertise there as well. Quoth the NYT: In the June 15 issue of Wine Spectator, Newton Vineyard purchased a series of ads on a narrow slice of the page that is known picturesquely as “the gutter” — the space, normally blank and white, between the binding and the first column of text. Maybe AA should consider it.

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Madonna may not have wanter her papa to preach but she doesn’t have any problem with his selling wine with her name on it. Tony Ciccone, recently decided to advance his winery business by releasing Madonna Wine, which is available in five varieties: Pinot Grigio, Pinot Noir, Gewurztraminer, Cabernet Franc and Chardonnay.  The label on each bottle features a colorful picture of Madonna, with whom he consulted beforehand to make sure his daughter approved of the idea. Those of you wondering what wine made in Michigan tastes like can go here to order some.

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Teaching my son the facts of life with ESPN’s Mike & Mike

A lot but not all days I drive Collateral Damage Jr. to school in the mornings. My car. My radio station. That basically comes down to a choice between NPR (paid member!) & ESPN. Here in Boston we have another AM radio station which alleges that is about sports and used to carry the Red Sox games. Now the Sox games have moved and that radio station mostly concerns itself with spewing hatred and bigotry on non-sports topics. So because I really don’t feel a need to keep Jr. up to date on all the latest deaths and disasters via NPR, we listen to ESPN.

They’re pretty funny and CDjr. was psyched to see them doing the announcing when ABC broadcast the finals of the National Spelling Bee.

M&M is a good source for topics of discussion, including agriculture (“Why is Greenberg going to milk a cow?”) and sex ed. A couple of weeks ago there was much discussion of a story in the news about a man suing an energy company over a prolonged priapic incident. So I got to explain what “engorged” means.

This week M&M have been talking about The Sopranos finale, pretty much non-stop. At some point during all the talking this morning someone made a comment about this being ESPN radio, a fact which hadn’t previously clicked with CDjr. He looks up from the back seat and says, “They’re on ESPN?!? Why don’t they ever talk about sports?”

That was about three times as funny as anything said on the show.

About The Sopranos: It was the PERFECT ending and not the one that satisfied most viewers. This was the ending that the creator wanted and oneI that fit with The Sopranos as a work of art and not as something put together to please the audience. It was an ending that said the fear and the life go on. We wrapped up with AJ clearly being set to become Tony Jr. We had the family meeting together at an old diner with a young couple echoing a young Tony and Carmella. We had the haunting fear that at any moment Tony was about to get popped by that guy in the Members Only jacket.

No audience survey would ever have come up with that ending. Nor would it have come up the rest of the series. Art gives you something to chew on. It doesn’t go down easy. It doesn’t come to the conclusion you want, it comes to the conclusion it needs. Most of the major story lines got concluded but to have the whole thing wrap up would have been a disservice to everything that went before.

And all the debate on Mike & Mike means I get to explain what words like whacked and Mafia mean. If I ever home school my kid, they are definitely going to be part of the curriculum.

I’ve enjoyed about as much of this as I can stand

• Upgraded the cell phone today and found out about the latest in wireless ripoffs: Got charged $10 to transfer my phone book from the old phone to the new. If my knowledge of electronics is right (well, it could happen) that means a profit of about $9.98 for Verizon. Oh, and I love the fact that they charge extra for a carrying case. Interesting loyalty builder — I pretty much only considered Motorola phones because I have a bunch of their chargers.
• Neotopia is a red state! Both Mrs. Collateral Damage and CDjr spend a fair amount of time on the marketing collosus that is Neopets. He got her hooked. I got no problem with that. There are several word games they play. Two words that the games won’t recognize as legitimate words: sex and cards.
• File under: Nice work if you can get it. Some ignorant legislator in Illinois is objecting to the fact that comedian Bernie Mac is going to be paid $500K this year for lending “his name and likeness for two TV ads, two radio ads and the lottery Web site for one year.” This amounts to roughly 2.5 days of work which means Mr. Mac is getting $23K an hour. Not sure, but I think that’s more than the minimum wage. Mr. Mac must be doing a heck of a job, as this is $80K more than he earned for doing the exact same thing last year. Now for entirely self-serving reasons, I have to say WAY TO GO DUDE! Don’t forget us, your less talented brethren in the comedy field.
• Two more product placements in The Sopranos last night. Sigh. Do it all you want on 2.5 Men or American Idol, but please can we leave it out of the little actual art on the airwaves? (David Fine is doing a better job of tracking this than I am, FYI.)
• No apology needed. TOKYO (Reuters) – A Japanese teacher, gripped by the baseball fever that seized the nation during a game with bitter rival South Korea, was forced to apologize after watching the game in a classroom where students were taking a test. In the Boston School system you get reprimanded for not having the game on. More true tales of Collateral Damage: In the week that lead up to the Bucky BLEEPING Dent game in ’78, all the nuns and lay teachers at St. Patrick’s Word of God in Providence RI — an evangelical Catholic institution where I went for jr. high school — just happened to have a radio on for all the day games. This was my first insight into what the phrase “Grace of God” was all about. Bumpersticker seen in the parking lot of McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket (pronounced peh-tuckit), home of the Triple AAA Red Sox team The PawSox (not pronounced peh-sux) in the late 80s: My daughter may be a whore, but at least she’s not a Yankee fan.
  

Tuesday’s (intentionally funny) headline of the day: Mob Boss Takes Hit; Housewife Implicated

From the NYT, re the Sopranos ratings being down because of ABC’s Desperate Housewives.