Now is the season when students across the country start preparing for graduation—and in turn, for attending college in the fall. If you’re one of the thousands of young men and women looking forward to university life with a mix of excitement and dread, this is the list for you. Pull out your tablet and start downloading, because these are the apps that college students can’t live without.
Every man needs a “man cave.” It’s the perfect place for a guy to get time away from the women in his life. Whether you want alone time in your “man cave,” or you’re having the guys over, there are a few things that you must have in order to have the perfect men’s environment where you can enjoy guy time.
Every “man cave” needs to have a look, a look that speaks about the man that will spend his precious time there. When setting up a “man cave,” it is important to have a good feel in the atmosphere. Decor will depend on your tastes, from sports to the outdoors.
After subverting the superhero genre with “Kick-Ass,” the creative team behind that film (director Matthew Vaughn, co-writer Jane Goldman and comic book writer Mark Millar) has returned with an equally over-the-top homage to spy movies. Developed separately from the Millar-penned comic on which it’s loosely based, Vaughn’s film improves on that version in just about every way, delivering a smarter (but no less absurd) take on Cold War-era spy movies that embraces as many genre conventions as it breaks. A mix of the old and new school, “Kingsman: The Secret Service” is a lot cooler than its clunky title might imply – a hyper-stylized, gratuitously explicit action film that would make James Bond blush. After all, this is a movie that cartoonishly blows up Barack Obama’s head without even blinking.
The movie opens 17 years earlier when, while on a mission in the Middle East, secret agent Harry Hart (Colin Firth) is unable to prevent the death of a fellow agent. Feeling personally responsible, he visits the man’s wife (Samantha Womack) and young son, Eggsy, giving them a medal with a special phone number on the back should they ever need a favor. Fast-forward to present day and Eggsy (Taron Egerton) has grown up to become a lower-class delinquent who’s wasted his incredible potential. When Eggsy gets in trouble with the law, Harry bails him out, eventually recruiting him as a candidate for the same secret agency his father worked for, the Kingsmen, an independent organization of highly-trained agents who put their lives on the line to protect the world. While Eggsy undergoes the ultra-competitive training program (with only one recruit earning a spot as a Kingsman), Harry investigates a potential threat involving a tech-genius billionaire named Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson) who wants to save the Earth from the dangerous effects of climate change by wiping out most of humanity.
Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Yeah, I know. Just let me say this, whatever side of the various debates around this holiday you are, whether you are joyously in love, miserably alone, happily alone, miserably in love, or on the horns of an incipient bust-up, there’s a good chance tomorrow night will go better for you with the help of a delicious, yet not too excessively potent, alcoholic beverage.
The Berried Treasure is yet another example of my dictum that the recipes that come to me along with free bottles of booze tend to be good to excellent. This is because marketers have a vested interest in making these promotional drinks taste as good as possible and so they tend to involve mixologists who really know what they’re doing. That definitely seems to apply to award winning New York bartender Christian Sanders, who created this week’s drink to promote Hornitos Reposado Tequila.
Sanders creation is built around a tequila that’s surprisingly complex and tasty, especially at it’s very reasonable price point, and the highly underrated, but not under-priced, flavor of blackberries. Indeed, on a per drink basis, the antioxidant laden berries might well run you more than the booze. It’s also relatively labor intensive for a DOTW beverage, but love and a little work kind of go hand in hand.
The Berried Treasure
2 ounces Hornitos Reposado Tequila
8 blackberries
2 sprigs of rosemary
3/4 ounce fresh lemon juice
3/4 ounce simple syrup (or 1 heaping tablespoon of superfine sugar)
2 dashes Angostura bitters
Put the tequila, lemon juice, bitters and simple syrup or sugar into a cocktail shaker along with six of your eight blackberries and one of your two sprigs of fresh rosemary. Muddle the blackberries and rosemary,so that you have a nice dark purple mixture. Add plenty of ice and shake very vigorously.
Now, here’s the tricky part for almost everyone who’s not a really experienced amateur or pro-bartender, and even for me. You’ll be double straining all of this into a old fashioned glass with ice cubes, but that’s slightly easier said than done.
The problem is that the pulp gets pretty thick — so thick, it very likely will prevent most of your drink from actually leaving your typical built-in cocktail shaker strainer. So, you’re going to need to use both a standard cocktail strainer like the pro bartenders use and a second mesh food strainer to strain out the pulp. This sounds harder than it actually is. Just hold the shaker with the cocktail stainer over your mesh strainer and allow the liquid to make its way through both strainers into the ice-filled glass. When that’s done, about a minute later, you’ll be ready to add the remaining two blackberries and rosemary sprig as garnishes.
****
It might be lot of work compared to the many of the drinks I feature here, but the Berried Treasure is a delightful concoction. It’s almost perfectly balanced between sweet and tart and complements the tang of the slightly mellowed blue agave of the Hornitos Reposada. (I can’t stop you from trying it with other reposados, of course, but I haven’t had a chance to test it out with a Brand X for myself.)
There is one genuine X factor here and it applies to any fresh fruit-based drink, that is the taste of the fruit. I accidentally bought two different brands of on sale (but still pricey) blackberries. The first batch was definitely sweeter and the second more tart, and that definitely impacted the final product. Still, the Berried Treasure was never less than exceptionally good, and you can always add a hair more sugar or simple syrup if you like.
It’s well established that “Fifty Shades of Grey” began life as fan fiction by a “Twilight” devotee who was frustrated with the lack of sex in the books, and that’s fair; there is but one sex scene in the entire series, after all. However, this married mother of two (!) didn’t just write about Bella and Edward (here named Ana and Christian) having sex: she wrote about them having rough sex, BDSM-type stuff that tries to present itself as a confident woman owning her sexuality, when in fact the sex is completely about him, and he is constantly looking for reasons to “punish” her. Christian Grey is basically the Patrick Bateman (“American Psycho”) of sex, to the point where “American Psycho” author Bret Easton Ellis saw so much of Patrick in Christian that he actually begged “Grey” author E. L. James for the right to write the film’s screenplay. She turned him down. That’s unfortunate; he might have made something watchable out of this.
Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) is a college senior who does her journalism major roommate Kate (Eloise Mumford) a solid by doing an interview on her behalf when Kate gets the flu. The interviewee is Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), a 27-year-old billionaire who is giving her school’s commencement speech. Ana is intimidated by Christian – yet conducts the most passive-aggressive interview in history – but something about Ana intrigues Christian. He visits her at the hardware store where she works, and later tracks her down at a bar after she drunk calls him to tell him off. She wakes up in his hotel room, and after a brief (and hilariously awkward) chat, it is clear that there is chemistry between them, and each wants to consummate the relationship.
However, Christian plays a different sport than Ana does. He doesn’t want a lover: he wants a submissive (honest to God quote from the movie: “I don’t make love. I fuck. Hard.”), and asks Ana to look over a lengthy contract that spells out the terms of their sexual relationship, unaware that Ana is a virgin. Once he discovers this, he softens his approach and gives her the loving first experience that girls wish for, but after that, it’s all business, and business is this: you will do what I want, when I want, or you will be punished. Ana refuses to sign the contract, though the two continue to see each other. They have lots of sex, he spanks and whips her, and despite his insistence that he is not a candy and flowers kind of guy, Ana thinks that this arrangement has the potential to blossom into something greater. Fool.
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