It’s no secret to anyone that I hate chicken.  It’s not that I don’t eat chicken because I eat almost anything.  Seriously, if you serve me something really disgusting, like, I don’t know, goats’ eyes those Chinese green eggs, maybe I’ll think about it for a few moments.  After that, however, there’s a pretty big chance I’ll try it.  Then I might say that it’s awful or absolutely disgusting and it goes onto the list of things that I’ll probably eat again, because I’m stubborn, but I definitely don’t like. Chicken is there.  I eat chicken very reluctantly.  It’s not…

Mine is ten.  Ah, but mine is fifteen.  Poor you, mine here is twenty-one.  Wow, only twenty-one? Mine is infinite.  It might seem like kids bickering, but in fact, we’re talking about one of the latest releases from Royal Salute – a super premium brand of blended Scotch whisky – Royal Salute Eternal Reserve. Its age, despite suggestively being titled “eternal”, is actually 21 years old.  However, it uses increasingly matured whiskies in its blend. The idea behind Royal Salute Eternal Reserve is actually quite simple.  In Royal Salute’s own words, “The very first creation of Royal Salute The Eternal…

If you watched the movie Magnolia, you may be familiar with the Darwin Award. But if you’re not, I’ll explain.  The Darwin Award is a sort of posthumous Oscar, which rewards individuals who have managed, though total lack of intelligence, to remove themselves from the hereditary human chain in a spectacularly idiotic way.  That is, they killed themselves in stupid ways. Like the American, for example, who, bothered by the sound his pickup was making, decided he would try to find out where the noise was coming from under the vehicle – while driving at 40 miles per hour.  Or…

Sometimes we just need to bring something back for it to become a success.  That’s what I thought after watching the film The Disaster Artist, directed by actor James Franco.  The Disaster Artist is based on another film: The Room.  Written and directed by an odd individual called Tommy Wiseau, The Room is widely considered the worst in the entire world. Franco’s film is really cool and genuinely made me want to watch Wiseau’s – and I’m not the only one.  The internet is packed with reports of people who watched one after the other. I would not dare to…

When I was a teenager, I watched a lot of television.  In fact, perhaps the only thing I did more than watch TV was eat – after all, I could watch TV and eat at the same time.  I do not suppose sitting in front of the screen with a packet of biscuits and a bucket of Coca-Cola was very healthy at all.  It also probably didn’t help much in forming interpersonal relationship during my informative years. On the other hand, it nurtured mu interest in cinema and indirectly, literature. One of my favourite series was Friends.  Friends certainly was…

When you pay attention to boredom, it gets unbelievably interesting.  Jon Kabat-Zinn was the first to utter this phrase.  I had never even heard of him and to tell the truth, I still don’t know who he is.  However, I have a feeling he’s right because I came across his phrase one afternoon precisely when I was trying to relieve my own boredom by looking up witty quotes. Boredom is perhaps the father of great discoveries – and of small ones too.  It was sheer boredom that made me watch Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz for fifteen long hours.  It was boredom…

Last year I had the opportunity to do something I would never have imagined – to taste a whisky more than fifty years old.  It was the last day of the Whisky Show in London.  I was standing next to one of the independent bottler’s kiosks, Gordon & McPhail to be exact, when I heard a cork being pulled.  “We need to finish the doses left in this bottle”, the exhibitor said to his colleague.  It was a rare 1949 Glen Grant, bottled in 2007.  Around me were half a dozen whisky lovers, who like me, were Lucky enough to…

If you’ve been following the blog for some time, you know that hamburger is a problem for me. In fact, a problem does not, on the contrary. It’s a solution. I love any kind of hamburger. I especially like those poorly fed, very tall and succulent. But even a soft-soled shoe works, if properly tempered. In fact, that phrase “pizza is like sex, even when it’s bad, it’s good”, it should not be with pizza. It should be hamburger. Because pizza is not always good. Pizza can be from something disgusting like broccoli, eggplant or sardines. While the only allowable…

If love at second sight exists in the whisky world, then it happened to me with Bowmore.  Before visiting the distillery, I wasn’t really taken by any of its malts.  Most of them seemed to me like a smoky attempt to please those who don’t go for a smoky taste.  Their names, like Darkest, Black, Tempest, Sea Dragon – sounded pretentious, a way of conveying power where there wasn’t any.  To tell the truth, I had never really been interested in Bowmore. Well, that was until I visited the distillery and was really able to see the meticulousness in Bowmore’s…

Today I’m going to start with a basic concept of economics: The law of supply and demand.  It is a principle of microeconomics that suggests the price of goods is determined by the balance between the quantity sought and offered.  So, if there is great demand for something but little availability, the price tends to rise.  However, if the product is widely accessible, but few people are interested in it, its price will decrease.  The classic concept of this theory was coined by Adam Smith and later refined by other scholars and economists. But let me illustrate with a…