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You know, there’s nothing wrong with Merlot. That damned “Sideways” movie just made it difficult to drink without fear that someone will kick down the door, slap it out of your hand and make you drink something earthier, with notes of berry, fir, paper, turnip, and the digestive lubricant of the common weevil. I like earthy wines, but when someone gives you a merlot, you ought to drink it. Eventually.

I am going through my wine cellar, starting from oldest to newest (see? I’m not a total novice), just to clear out the stuff before it converts to vinegar. I know, I know: it improves with age. Except when it doesn’t, and gets ruined by temperature variations. I should note that the “cellar” is the downstairs storage closet – an excellent room for storing wine, but probably a little too cool. Or hot. I don’t know. I do know that I pulled out a white a while ago, and the stuff in the bottle would cut through the deck of the Nostromo. Then again, I bought it for the usual sensible, informed reasons:

It was on sale

I liked the label

I’ve said this before, but I’m convinced that label design is the single greatest factor in impulse wine sales. There’s a wine called “Barefoot,” and I’ll never buy it, simply because the picture on the bottle makes you think of someone’s foot squishing the grapes. I know it’s a fine honored old-country tradition, but if there is one item I do not want as the intermediary between the grape and my mouth, it is someone else’s foot. Usually I drink Australian wine – Penfold’s, to be specific, because the label had a classic old font and a severe, dignified layout. It looked like something they’d pull out in an English club in 1947.

James Kileks

Oh, those wacky Muslems

“Islam never differentiates between men and women, so it is not rational for us to think that God has placed a sign to indicate the virginity of women without having a similar sign to indicate the virginity of men,” El Gindy said.

“Any man who is concerned about his prospective wife’s hymen should first provide a proof that he himself is virgin,” he added.

El Gindy voiced his full support for Gomaa.


Wilford “Crazy Ray” Jones dies

Wilford “Crazy Ray” Jones, who turned a stint selling seat cushions at the Cotton Bowl into a nationally recognizable role as an unofficial Dallas Cowboys mascot, has died. Mr. Jones, 76, died Saturday at an Irving hospice. Friends said he suffered from congestive heart failure and had recently had a heart attack.
“Crazy Ray” entertained decades of Cowboys fans and became a Dallas institution in chaps and white boots.

Ms. Hirsi Ali was born in 1969 in Mogadishu–into, as she puts it, “the Islamic civilization, as far as you can call it a civilization.” In 1992, at age 22, her family gave her hand to a distant relative; had the marriage ensued, she says, it would have been “an arranged rape.” But as she was shipped to the appointment via Europe, she fled, obtaining asylum in Holland. There, “through observation, through experience, through reading,” she acquainted herself with a different world. “The culture that I came to and I live in now is not perfect,” Ms. Hirsi Ali says. “But this culture, the West, the product of the Enlightenment, is the best humanity has ever achieved.” http://www.opinionjournal.com/forms/printThis.html?id=110009771