THE MOJITO SLURPEE REDUX

We reiterate, for fear that you weren’t paying attention; for fear that we were unclear about the amount of sugar; for fear that our recent tinkering has removed all speckles or flecks from the recipe in a way that might cause confusion. We reiterate; the mojito slurpee we invented to beat the heatwave is the living end, man. We are worried that you will deprive yourself of this fine summer blender drink simply because of our paucity of imagination in describing its charms to you. So we reiterate; one shot of rum (ours is brought up in hand luggage from our Barbados hideaway. Yours can come from anywhere, any tint, any brand. Experiment!), one half of a large-ish lime’s freshly squeezed juice, six or so mint leaves and somewhere between one and two-and-a-half teaspoons of sugar. All into the blender with one to two handfuls of ice. This recipe is per person, see. Per drink. So multiply as needed. Sugar quantity should go hand in hand with ice quantity, as in if you’re using more of one, use more of the other. Blend long, until you’ve hit slurpee-like consistency. Earlier we said it was greenish-white and speckled, but we take that back. Blend the fucker until it’s pure green. Yeah. Do it tonight. It’s really something. Please don’t think about it and then not do it because it means a trip to the store or because you’re not used to buying mint or because you’ll have to dig out the blender from the back of the bottom cupboard. Just for once take our word for it. Make the drink.

Now, about our recent professional layoff; thanks to those distraught readers who wrote in to offer condolences, support, money, publishing deals, job postings, hugs, drugs and so on. We wish to assure you all that we are just fine. We may have failed to mention that we worked for a pre-ipo high-tech start up in the battered and bloodied telecommunications field, so it’s not as though we were surprised. Layoffs were a regular part of our daily corporate existence. The axe swung regularly down in the salt mines.

Nor are we horribly worried about our future. Of course we could simply sell our reader list of your names to Universal Vivendi AOL Time Warner PepsiCo and retire happily, but that is not our style. We have a peculiar kink; we prefer to work. Yes!

This is how we at Mango Pudding Blues look for work; we phone our agent and then we lean back in our chair with our fingers interlaced behind our head, awaiting the call. We have so far been putting off phoning our agent, so that we have some time to play piano and listen to 1970s Italian pop music and perfect the iced latte.

So, one needn’t worry about us, unless one is a wealthy reader. Wealthy readers are invited to submit grants to the Mango Pudding Blues Take the Whole Summer Off fund. We would certainly accept such grants. We would apply the grants to further R ’n’ D in the Mango Pudding Blues beverage lab, the same lab whose studies recently bore fruit with the delicious mojito slurpee.

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LAID

...off, that is. We at Mango Pudding Blues have always sort of thought that we would be better off blogging full-time rather than working. Apparently, our former employers feel the same way, since they laid us off today. Now we will be able to bend the full strength of our laser-like focus on you, our readers. Heh heh heh.

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BANGKOK

...and speaking of Thailand, was I hotter and moister in Bangkok or Bridgetown, Barbados than I am right now, at 7:30 am, in my own Ottawa apartment? No. The weekend brought a heat wave of hellish intensity to the region, forcing me, last night, to invent the mojito slurpee. One shot rum per person, juice of half a lime, teaspoon and a half or so sugar, five or six mint leaves and a handful of ice. Whiz in the blender. Greenish white. Speckled. Delightful. High today; 35? Celsius with, like, 90 percent humidity.

Montreal? Perfect, of course. Belgian fireworks, the wooden roller coaster, barbecued lamb, a tour of the new boutique hotels (Canadians; these were written up in the weekend’s Globe and Mail travel section), Italian pop music from the Seventies, gin and Triple-Sec martinis, dim sum and durian milkshakes in Chinatown, an outdoor exhibit of Earth From Above photographs, a ride on the metro (in which we saw the latest on the young asian girls; not just low-rise jeans, but low-rise jeans that are open to reveal the tops of the panties) shrimp school in which Killer and I learned the shucking and de-veining of shrimp, which led to shrimp seviche on the deck with Bonny Doon’s Malvasia Bianca (the third BD wine of the weekend; a Vin Gris de Cigare at the St. James hotel bar and, Friday night in Ottawa, the Framboise as a dessert to Killer’s new coconut-basil chicken soup), a perfect cheese course, a pass through the Jazz Festival to see kids creating wild Ornette Coleman/Cecil Taylor harmelodic free jazz on one of those big pianos, waffles with blackberry pansy syrup and, well, I could go on, but I’m sweating into the keyboard here. You get the picture.

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