tequila mockingbird
August 1st, 2008 by 
bkmarcus
 (Click to Enlarge) |
Harper Lee has been on my mind recently — ever since seeing her portrayed in Capote a few weeks ago.
But tonight she came to mind in an unusually perverse way. I found myself wondering if there was a cocktail called Tequila Mockingbird. There had to be, right?
Turns out there are a bunch of them. They all start out with tequila and lime juice, but the last ingredients vary:
- tomato juice
- green peppermint liqueur
- green creme de menthe (2)
- white creme de menthe (2)
- black currant-flavored liqueur & apple cider
- triple sec, blue curacao, OJ, cranberry juice
That's not a complete list, I'm sure, but it's what I pulled from the first page of Google hits. The green and white cremes de menthe each occurred on 2 pages, so I think creme de menthe, generically, wins the competition for genuine recipe.
That image in the upper right is from MAD magazine issue 289, September 1989. Because Google reads PDF files, and because I run Google Desktop on my MacBook, and because I have decades worth of back issues of MAD magazine stored on my hard drive, the top hit for "tequila mockingbird" was for this panel from MAD289.pdf.
August 2nd, 2008 at 9:28 am
"cremes de menthe"
I smiled when I read that. "Attorneys general" anyone?
August 2nd, 2008 at 9:51 am
Oh yes. One more thing.
On seeing the phrase, and wondering whether or not the first "e" in "creme" should be accented (answer? either way is fine), I pulled up Spotlight and typed in the word "creme".
Instead of seeing the expected dictionary entry (in fact, there wasn't one in the search results), my top hit was a Quicktime movie, "Creme.mov".
Hmmm.... not being much of a dabbler in web porn, I wondered how I ended up with a movie so named on my drive. Opening the file, I was presented with a short, demonstrative video of a disembodied pair of hands making an apple crème brûlée. Odd. How in the world did that get on my drive?
As it turns out, many Mac OS X applications (it's trial and error on which support it) will show you the path to the currently opened file if you command-click on the document window title bar. A quick click in Quicktime Player, and I was presented with...
/Developer/Examples/Quartz/Core Animation/Recipes/creme.mov
(Another trick many new Mac users don't know... in some applications (Safari, for example) if you drag a file to an open text field, you get the file path... Very slick.)
So, we have our answer. Apple's OS X Developer Tools (it's not accurate to say Mac OS X Developer Tools now that the suite also allows the development of iPhone applications) include sample code, and in this particular case, the Core Animation sample code references a Quicktime movie file of someone preparing a tasty dessert. On building the sample code, I discovered the resulting application to be a rather lame and poorly written recipe rolodex.
How disappointing. I'd rather it was porn.