This week: Billy Bragg makes “Ode” new again… an English Major fails the cough test… and Brendan talks to a cholesterocidal maniac.
Small Talk: Express Lanes, Dr. Coffee and Hot Pants
The staff from Marketplace tells you stories from this week’s news that your guests won’t have heard.
History Lesson with Booze: Who Wanted to Be a Millionaire and the “Deception”
This week in 2001, British Army Major Charles Ingram, his wife Diana and college lecturer Tecwen Whittock won £1 Million on the UK version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? If you’re thinking that three people aren’t allowed to team up to play WWTBAM, you’re right.
“Deception,” created for the DPD by Christian Self, bar manager at 39 Hotel in Honolulu, HI
In short glass:
- muddle two orange slices
- add juice of one quarter of a lime
- add 1 oz of orange vodka
- add 1 oz of blood orange liquer
- add 2 oz of campari
Add ice. Shake and serve. Tell your friends it’s fruity sweet. Hear them cough and watch their faces pucker.
Guest of Honor: Billy Bragg
Billy Bragg is the UK’s one and only electro-socialist-folk-pop star. His early albums were a collision of unrequited love and unrequited revolution in the age of Thatcher and Reagan. In the ’90s he dabbled in modern pop, until finally earning a Grammy — along with Wilco — for setting unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics to new music. This week Billy tells Rico about his latest project… a collaboration with the late Ludwig Van Beethoven.
Main Course: Deep Fried Butter
It’s state fair season which means lots of inventive cooks are putting things on sticks that don’t belong there. Also cauldrons of fat are bubbling across the country filled with everything from jalepeno peppers to Mars bars. By now we’re so used to the zany foods that come from our nation’s state fairs, that it takes a lot to impress us. Enter Abel Gonzalez and his “Deep Fried Butter” – golf ball sized orbs of gooey butter injected with flavor; quite possibly the sweetest form of euthanasia ever invented. Able won the “Most Creative Food” prize at the Texas State Fair for the second year in a row. Last year his “Deep Fried Coca Cola” took top honor.
One for the Road: Unrest’s “Isabel”
Far be it from us to know why Unrest isn’t on heavy rotation in hipster caves around the country. Maybe it’s because they’re stuff is hard to find; then again that didn’t stop Bert Jansch from having a renaissance. More likely, the authorites have been slowly taking Unrest records out of the music supply for fear that it will turn us all into blissed out indie-sensualists.
