NYT writer and blogger John Tierney recently staged a contest for people to submit the Worst Bad Name, and today he announced the “winner”: a lady from Cleveland named Iona Knipl.

(Well, the actual winner is the reader who sent in the winning submission, but you get the idea)

The real amusement comes from the comments, where people felt obliged to chime in with dozens of punny names. Though people sometimes claim to know people with these names, more often than not these are the sort of “FOAF” urban legend things that the folks at Snopes spend a great deal of time debunking. Among the so-called “real, I *SWEAR*” names are such classics as Lemonjello and Orangello, “Anna Rexik”, “Dick Hurtz” and so on. At this point it’s hard to believe that anyone really thinks someone named their kid “Dick Hurtz”, but, then, most Americans still believe Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, so what do I know?

Last week, it was Vidiot giving us a peek into the world of drinking rye whiskey like the big boys do, and today it’s Mark at “Going Like Sixty” giving us the inside scoop on the manly man’s way to smoke a cigar.

Ah, the joys of middle age, where nobody can tell you you can’t smoke big smelly cigars and swill down throat-scorching alcoholic beverages. There are indeed advantages to sliding into geezerhood.

I used to enjoy an occasional cigar, and by “occasional” I mean like one or two a year. Even at that low frequency, though, I bet I haven’t puffed on a Cuban Death Log in a good ten years. I do have a good reason not to pick up a real smoking habit, but I don’t have any particular explanation for having gotten so far away from enjoying an occasional cigar. I szuppose sipping whiskey and smoking cigars are sort of complementary behaviors, actually. Done right, they just about cancel out the associated unpleasant flavors in the mouth and tell-tale odors on the breath, and induce a similar degree of buzziness in the head. And that can’t be all bad.

Once summer starts up around here, I might have to consider spending an evening on the deck with a glass in one hand and a cigar in the other, contemplating the fireflies.

Now, who’s the expert on chasing younger women?

Mutual friend of Torrez “Vidiot” has a long post at his cocktail blog Cocktailians today about attending a rye whiskey tasting class.

The class was given by LeNell Smothers, the proprietress of a well-known boutique liquor store in Brooklyn and the maker of her own label of rye whiskey, Red Hook. Vidiot says they sampled half a dozen different whiskeys (not all of them strictly rye), and his post summarizes the characteristics and qualities of the whiskeys they tried, along with LeNell’s personal notes and recommendations.

I am still very much a complete n00b when it comes to whiskey. Over the space of the last year or so I’ve just started out trying a couple of Scotches, found that I really like Bourbon, and most recently branched out to try some Irish whisky. I would love to find a tasting class like this where someone who really knows their stuff can help the newcomer appreciate what the heck it is they’re drinking. Though I absolutely would not consider myself any sort of expert with wine, I did finally reach the point where I had worked out some understanding of it through my own effort, but I’m probably never going to be a big enough whiskey drinker to get the same level of exposure. I’ll have to look around and see if any of the better liquor stores around my area do events like this; I have to imagine that they do.

photo from labelscar.com

Labelscar.com is a fascinating blog about shopping malls all across the United States (via).

On the face of it, malls seem anything BUT interesting — from the outside they’re oversized, featureless buildings surrounded by acres of parking lot, and inside they are often sterile and (thanks to the plethora of national mall retail chains) generic. Nevertheless, shopping malls became the crossroads of hundreds of American communities in the 1970s and 1980s and are as deeply enmeshed in our culture today as the fabled downtown ever was in the earlier part of the 20th Century. I vivdly remember when the first enclosed mall opened in my hometown (well, in the city across the river, Lewiston, but the distinction between the two cities is blurry at best) and I was already in high school when the “big” mall opened (really in my hometown this time). My friends and I spent plenty of time at the mall, but we escaped being true mallrats by only a couple of years. Now, we are well into a second generation of Americans whose public sphere has only ever been the mall.

“Labelscar” takes its name from the mark left behind when a store leaves a particular mall space, and the removal of the store logo leaves behind unsullied paint or other marks. A lot of this website is taken up with documenting defunct malls, and, as with the photo above, the pictures of spaces ordinarily full of people and goods gone dark and empty cause a bit of cognitive dissonance.

One particular subsection of the site appealed to me quite a bit: All The Malls Of New England. One of the site’s authors claims that he has been inside every single enclosed shopping mall in all six New England states. He lists all of the malls he’s been inside, though he only has photos of a small subset. I believe that I have come up with two that he missed — the Tontine Mall in Brunswick and the Rainbow Mall in Portland. The Tontine Mall still exists as far as I know (I haven’t been to Brunswick in years), but the Rainbow Mall long ago became the home of Andover College. It has not been a mall for so long, that it’s likely that the blog author isn’t old enough to ever know it was a mall.

Neat website, good for an afternoon’s-worth of noodling around. Lots of interesting and informative comments from visitors reminsicing about their childhood malls or filling in some of the gaps in information.