Yay, cachaça!

Many winters ago (I'm thinking it was in 1996 or maybe 1997), I attended a great cocktail party at my friend Martin K.'s big, art-filled apartment. He had just returned from Brazil . . . with cachaça. This marked my first encounter with the stuff. Many caipirinhas died that night.

I didn't encounter cachaça again -- unless I count a few dodgy caipirinhas in Las Vegas, consumed with the encouragement if not the moral support of  princeofcairo -- until I went to XIV Encontro Internacional de RPG in São Paulo, in July 2006. The elixir simply didn't exist in Montréal. Needless to say, I brought some back with me.

On returning home, I wanted to kick myself for sticking to my tax-free limit. The woman at Canada Customs read my declaration, asked me what cachaça was, and then proceeded to interrogate me . . . about the taste, recipes, and everything but taxes. As I was alone with her in a big, mostly dark room, it was kind of creepy. But she didn't check my baggage. I could've brought back a case!

Soon, however, it seemed as though it didn't matter. In late 2006, cachaça showed up on the Montréal scene! There was talk of it being the New Hotness in the city come 2007! Every bartender and SAQ salesman was positive that caipirinhas would be the coming summer's hip cocktail. So I just bought a little bit. "Montréal loves its trends," I thought. "If this is anything like the porto trend, I won't be able to swing a cat without knocking over cachaça bottles."

Heh. I never learn. By summer 2007, the city was once again cachaça-dry. I couldn't even get expensive snob stuff. It wasn't available at any price.

Then today, whilst dear Bonnie was out buying the ingredients for falernum (something else you can't get here), lo, she spotted cachaça at the friendly neighborhood SAQ outlet. It's a brand I don't know -- Leblon -- and it slightly disconcertingly calls itself "Brazilian rum." It makes a decent caipirinha, though. I'd welcome the input of any cachaça connoisseurs on this brand.

Everybody else is doing it . . .

Take a picture of yourself right now.
Don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair...just take a picture.
Post that picture with NO editing.
Post these instructions with your picture.

How could I turn that down? I believe that seeing more faces on the Internet would go a long way toward defusing all the rudeness caused by people forgetting that they're dealing with other people, not with machines. And I'm not really big on visual anonymity, either. So here goes:



This mostly tells me that I need to shave more, to avoid that Hugh Laurie look, and that taking pictures with a camera at arm's reach means your head will look really big. Cool.

Another week in the life of GURPS

As tradition demands on Friday night, here's the latest dope on GURPS:

• I've finished polishing the final, edited draft of GURPS Action 2: Heroes. All that's standing between it and you is . . . well, a whole laundry list of boring-but-necessary editorial and production steps. But the content is final!

• The GURPS Mass Combat playtest is over. David Pulver is revising even as I type this. Editing this one will be my next task after Heroes.

• There was enough progress on uncontracted and/or unannounced projects to rate a news item of its own, even though I can't share specifics. This week saw a long-awaited hardback come unstalled and start moving toward publication, meaningful creative progress on six contracted-but-unannounced PDFs, an outline for the first PDF in a series of cool PDFs that will save much work done on an ill-fated hardback, and an outline for a long-awaited hardback for late 2009.*

* No, none of these items are GURPS Vehicle Design.