via firehose ("first confirmation that the Austin shooter was an old white guy")
A white, middle-aged gunman, in what appears to be a politically motivated anti-government attack linked to immigration, fired more than a hundred rounds at buildings in downtown Austin early Friday and tried to set fire to the Mexican consulate before he died of a gunshot wound.
The unidentified suspect was described as white male in his 50s with a criminal record.
Michele Carragher, the head embroider on Game of Thrones, made this awesome tutorial to show how she created the dragonscale fabric that appears on several of Daenarys’ costumes in S3 and S4.
Ms. Carragher says that the dragonscale fabric was created because “In season 3 the Costume Designer Michele Clapton wanted a Dragonscale like textured embroidery that starts to emerge on three of Daenery’s costumes, which becomes heavier and more pronounced, growing and evolving as the season progresses” (Carragher).
In stages 9-11 of the tutorial we see how the textile evolves from lightly to heavily embellished. This progression is meant to illustrate Daenarys’ personal growth and the growth of her dragons (source).
“Profits from the sales of conflict antiquities are clearly partly underwriting Islamic State operations, and thus partly underwriting repression, war and genocide. And regardless of the precise numbers, that reality reinforces the need for cultural property protection, antiquities trade regulation and powerful policing.”
Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room is home to thousands of archived recordings from some of the most important English language-poets of the age — T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost. (Curt Nickisch/WBUR)
Imagine being around the Thanksgiving table on Thursday and having someone pull out a sound recording of a family member you barely knew, or a relative you’d only heard stories about.
That rare, personal discovery is something that poetry researchers at Harvard University are now experiencing. In the warmly lit Woodberry Poetry Room, walled with well-worn books, researcher Mary Walker Graham is unwrapping a sealed wooden box like a gift.
Inside it is a sort of gift, a gift to the English language. A black record, a disc, the only one of its kind in the world. In wax crayon in the center is written: “Canto 56, Part 2.”
It’s a master recording of Ezra Pound in 1939, reading part of his modern epic poem, “The Cantos.” But the disc is falling apart.
A new service from a Massachusetts nonprofit is recovering endangered audio recordings, such as this one of Ezra Pound reading part of his epic poem “The Cantos” in 1939. (Julie Martin/NEDCC)
“You can see that the lacquer is beginning to come completely separated from the metal base,” Walker Graham says, holding the record. “It’s far past beginning, actually, this is what you would call advanced delamination. Once it gets to this phase obviously it can’t get anywhere near a needle. This is completely unplayable.”
It’s just one of thousands of archived recordings of some of the most important poets of the recording age: T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost.
“It’s a very humanizing thing,” says archive curator Christina Davis. “I mean I think audio archives, because it’s so connected to the body and breath — in a way that text is somewhat divorced from — you know, kind of reunite us with the total body.”
But the voices on many of these brittle, early records have been dead — silenced for nearly a century. They’re too damaged to play. That is, until today. Walker Graham has always wanted to listen to a fragile T.S. Eliot recording with a written note saying: extra word at end.
She says she’s been dreaming about that extra word. “Where instead of, in the end of his famous poem, ‘The Hollow Men,’ which everyone knows the line: The world ends ‘Not with a bang but a whimper.’ I had a dream that it was: ‘Not with a bang but a chicken cluck,'” she says, laughing. “Just last night. So, we’ll see!”
A rendered image of the etched grooves of a record. IRENE software converts these squiggles to sound. (Julie Martin/NEDCC)
They are going to see, thanks to a new service from the nonprofit Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover. In November, NEDCC began offering a preservation technology called IRENE to museums, archives and private collectors.
“IRENE can do something that no other technology can do, which is to put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” says NEDCC director Bill Veillette.
Veillette says his laboratory traditionally preserves paper documents. Walking through the conversation laboratory is like walking through the centuries, as conservators carefully preserve books, maps and vintage photographs. In a separate area of the center, digital archivists take high-resolution images of rare and delicate documents for posterity.
Now the center has begun taking pictures of voices.
In the next room, audio technician Mason Vander Lugt is operating the IRENE machine. It’s a high-tech turntable that looks more like an industrial work bench. As the fragile record slowly spins, a 3D camera takes high-resolution pictures of the microscopic scratches etched into the record’s grooves.
Then Vander Lugt uses computer software to convert the images of the microscopic squiggles to sound — sound that had been lost to the ages, like the single gouged side of a Robert Frost recording from around 1940.
IRENE’s high resolution 3D camera surveys the microscopic surface of a broken record. (Julie Martin/NEDCC)
“That’s the second side of this recording, where the engineer scraped out the recording so nobody would play it,” Vander Lugt says surveying rows of shaky black lines against a white background on his computer monitor. “And we get to go against his wishes, and find out what’s on it anyways.”
What is on the side not taken? “The Road Not Taken,” announces Frost amid the scratchy clicks and pops of the rescued recording:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
As Frost continues on the record, Vander Lugt says: “Each time the software comes across the gouge that you can see, in the image, there’s a pop. But that’s an accurate representation of the disc that we have.”
IRENE was inspired by a story on public radio.
“At that time I was driving back and forth to Silicon Valley,” says Carl Haber of 2000, when he was stuck in a traffic jam listening to his local public radio station, KQED. On came a story about the endangered state of archived sound recordings. Haber’s a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was studying the surface of silicon, trying to understand its shape and how particles reacted on it.
“And then I heard thing the thing about sound recordings,” he remembers. “And that idea about looking at images of particles turned into looking at images of sound. It’s just one of those accidental things.”
Now Haber’s accidental eureka is creating euphoria at Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room. Researchers Davis and Walker Graham have been devouring all the sonic treasures that IRENE has saved from decrepit records.
Woodberry Poetry Room researchers compare the rescued recordings with published text for variant versions and new insights. (Curt Nickisch/WBUR)
They were delighted to hear poet Marianne Moore’s normal speaking voice, something you never hear in commercial recordings. They marveled at the young voice of Muriel Rukeyser in her first known recording, at the age of 27. And they recovered the only Wallace Stevens reading of “It Must Change,” from 1954 – part of his poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.”
A single text, granite monotony
One sole face, like a photograph of fate
So the poem goes, in pulses of pentameter. Stevens scholar and literary critic Helen Vendler says this newly-recovered recording adds to her understanding of him.
“It’s important to hear the way he hears his own lines,” Vendler says. “Because that isn’t always conveyed on the page.”
Among the sound recordings that have been saved is that T.S. Eliot record from 1947, the one with the mysterious note about the extra word at the end. Turns out, that extra word is just an accidental cut-off word, barely a syllable, at the end of the recording.
It wasn’t a chicken cluck, but it was close.
Whether mundane or poetic, that’s the power of this technology, the unbreaking of broken records.
So that the fading voices of the 20th century don’t go out with a whimper, but come back with a bang.
‘Not approved by Mr. Frost.’ The gouged side of a Robert Frost master recording, unplayable with a stylus, can be heard through IRENE technology. Among the poems on the side not taken is “The Road Not Taken.” (Julie Martin/NEDCC)
THROUGHOUT recorded history, humans have reigned unchallenged as Earth’s dominant species. Might that soon change? Turkeys, heretofore harmless creatures, have been exploding in size, swelling from an average 13.2lb (6kg) in 1929 to over 30lb today. On the rock-solid scientific assumption that present trends will persist, The Economist calculates that turkeys will be as big as humans in just 150 years. Within 6,000 years, turkeys will dwarf the entire planet. Scientists claim that the rapid growth of turkeys is the result of innovations in poultry farming, such as selective breeding and artificial insemination. The artificial nature of their growth, and the fact that most have lost the ability to fly, suggest that not all is lost. Still, with nearly 250m turkeys gobbling and parading in America alone, there is cause for concern. This Thanksgiving, there is but one prudent course of action: eat them before they eat you.
The king ordered the experiment to be conducted using two identical twins. Both of the twins had been tried for the crimes they had committed and condemned to death. Their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment on the condition that one of the twins drank three pots[1] of coffee, and the other drank the same amount of tea, every day for the rest of their lives.[4]
Two physicians were appointed to supervise the experiment and report its finding to the king.[5] Unfortunately, both doctors died, presumably of natural causes, before the experiment was completed.[4] Gustav III, who was assassinated in 1792, also died before seeing the final results. Of the twins, the tea drinker was the first to die, at age 83; the date of death of the surviving coffee drinker is unknown.[6]
Ginsburg was expected back at work on Monday, but her hospitalization — just three weeks after elections handed Republicans control of the Senate — raised anew the question whether President Barack Obama would be able to appoint a like-minded replacement.
The tradition of the White House turkey pardon supposedly dates back to 1947 and President Harry Truman. However, one year it went horribly awry.
In 2011, the Washington Post tracked down a longtime rumor that a turkey presented to President Richard Nixon had to have its feet nailed to a table for the occasion.
"Regarding the effort to restrain the White House Thanksgiving turkey, it is my understanding that at least one year, they nailed its feet to the table," the staffer wrote.
Linton Weeks reflects on the scrappy history of Thanksgiving, which “in turn-of-the-20th century America used to look a heckuva lot like Halloween”:
People — young and old — got all dressed up and staged costumed crawls through the streets. In Los Angeles, Chicago and other places around the country, newspapers ran stories of folks wearing elaborate masks and cloth veils. Thanksgiving mask balls were held in Cape Girardeau, Mo., Montesano, Wash., and points in between. …
In fact, so many people participated in masking and making merry back then that, according to a widely distributed item that appeared in the Los Angeles Times of Nov. 21, 1897, Thanksgiving was “the busiest time of the year for the manufacturers of and dealers in masks and false faces. The fantastical costume parades and the old custom of making and dressing up for amusement on Thanksgiving day keep up from year to year in many parts of the country, so that the quantity of false faces sold at this season is enormous.”
In 2012, Greg Young noted that the “custom was mostly frowned upon by polite society as a distraction from the historic and somber traditions of Thanksgiving”:
Thanksgiving ‘masking’, as it was often called, stemmed from a satirical perversion of destitution and the ancient tradition of mumming, where men in costumes floated from door to door, asking for food and money, often in exchange for music. In the 19th century, makeshift Thanksgiving parades — fantasticals — featured New Yorkers marching through the street in garish costume, most likely inspired by Guy Fawkes Day. By the late 19th century, these had morphed into a day for children to take to the street in ragamuffin garb, going from door to door, begging for fruit, candy and even pennies. …
By 1924, New York could focus its holiday cheer onto more controllable pursuits with the debut of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Within a couple decades, it appears that the merry tradition of Thanksgiving masking slowly relocated over to the less dignified Halloween ….
Children weren’t just roaming the streets begging pennies. What was especially annoying was their “practice of ringing all the doorbells and demanding backsheesh.” By 1930, New York’s Superintendent of Schools was publicly condemning the Thanksgiving begging, calling it a “serious annoyance to householders” and encouraging school principles and teachers to instruct students in the origins, meaning, and proper observance of Thanksgiving. Between official disapproval and the low mood and tight purse brought on by the Depression, Thanksgiving mummery virtually disappeared in the late 1930s.
But dressing up and going about ringing doorbells and “demanding backsheesh” didn’t disappear; it just moved to Halloween. We call it “trick or treating.”
Below, watch a home movie of some of the last maskers to traipse around New York in the 1940s:
In Los Angeles and Oakland, demonstrators took to the streets for a third night to show solidarity with the family of Michael Brown
A relative calm fell on Ferguson, Missouri, on Wednesday following two nights of violent protests after a grand jury declined to bring charges against a white police officer in the shooting death of unarmed, black teen Michael Brown, but in California tensions remained high as nearly 200 protesters were arrested.
In Los Angeles and Oakland, demonstrators took to the streets for a third night since the grand jury decision in a show of solidarity with the family of the dead Missouri teen. Protesters blocked roads and even clashed with police, the LA Times reported.
Sales of turkeys are up in Waitrose and Ocado as the British latch on to the American holiday in a big way, supermarket claims
The turkey is roasting, the cranberry sauce is resting, and the pumpkin pie is good to go. It’s a scene being played out today in homes not just from California to New Jersey, but from Coventry to Neasden, too.
Welcome to Britsgiving: the UK’s newest and completely unofficial holiday. Waitrose this week told the Guardian it estimates one in six Britons now celebrate Thanksgiving, a number that just seems to be going up and up. Sales of turkeys in November are up 95% on five years ago at Waitrose, and 135% year-on-year from Ocado. #Happythanksgiving is currently trending on Twitter across the UK.
The skull is one of the most clichéd graphic symbols ever devised. It's a physiognomic necessity, yes, but also a routine emblem of authority and dissent, caution, and prohibition. It represents both power and mortality and has been preserved time and again for scientific, artistic, theatrical, and existential purposes. Pirates once pledged allegiance to skulls; these days they are popular as hip fashion accessories.
Recently, I wrote the foreword for Monte Beauchamp's Popular Skullture: The Skull Motif in Pulps, Paperbacks, and Comics(Kitchen Sink/Dark Horse Comics), a collection of skull covers that celebrates the motif’s commercial legacy. This rich collection, which features 160 skulls from the 1930s through the 1950s, is still a small swath considering the countless craniums (and other memento mori and vanitas) that appear in commercial and fine art, as well as religious and pagan iconography. Nonetheless, it is fascinating record of how illustrators and designers have improvised on the silhouette to capture attention and sell products.
Dark Horse Comics
Dark Horse Comics
The skull may be ubiquitous, but it’s never struggled to be fearsome. Once the emblem of Hitler’s SS, the totenkopf (death’s head) remains as ferocious and fearsome as ever. Yet, where in the Nazi context it implies torture and murder, the skull’s arresting look has also become the emblem of safety notices. It’s known as a common hazard symbol on warning labels for poison and other lethal substances. Which presents an interesting paradox: One use threatens lives, another saves them. There are two sides to every skull.
Used for good or ill, the core reason why the skull has remained so powerful is that it is a reminder that everyone dies. That was a theme Shakespeare picked up on when he inserted a skull into Hamlet at the moment when his eponymous Danish prince recites a monologue over the reclaimed skull of his friend Yorick.
Alas, poor Yorick! … Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?
By sadly recalling the vivacious human spirit that once inhabited the skull, Shakespeare channels the idea that however cheerful the spirit, ultimately everyone’s just bones. Here the symbol is subtle: It was a natural realization for the downcast Hamlet to come to in the midst of the play’s downward spiral.
In the vibrant 20-year period the book covers, the skull enjoyed a flashier role in paperbacks, pulps, magazines, film posters, and comics. To avoid being inconsequential, artists and designers repurposed the cliché in novel ways, creating visual puns (such as making skulls into coconuts) or dressing them up in human dress, which added levity to and transformed darkness into illuminated kitsch.
Dark Horse ComicsDark Horse Comics
Skullculture reveals that skulls entertain just as well as they depress. Yet as versatile as they are, skulls are less effective in symbolizing happiness then when used to connote mystery, murder, and mayhem. That’s when the good old meaning of the skull can’t be beat.
Dark Horse ComicsDark Horse ComicsDark Horse Comics
‘Tis the season for marathon multi-course meals that can leave your belly like a bowl full of jelly. Missa Chamness, hospitality manager of TheBlue Roomand Belly Wine Bar, expounds on the benefits of bitter sips for this otherwise jolly time of year. The restaurants’ focus on the “true Italian way to eat” includes amari, bitter herbal liqueurs served after a meal as digestivos. “You start with an aperitivo, you have wine throughout dinner, and you finish with a digestivo. Unlike aperitivos which are supposed to open up the palate and ease into the meal, digestivos are supposed to have a medicinal quality and to aid in digestion. Whether they truly do or not, I’m mentally convinced that they help or at least just calm my nerves after shocking my body with copious amounts of food.”
Thanksgiving is just the beginning of the over-indulgence season, so check out Missa’s amari (singular, amaro) pairings below to get you through your heavy winter meals and holiday feasts.
With red meat:
“With beef or lamb, or something iron-y and fat-enriched, I want a drink that’s kind of dark and bitter, super medicinal and dry to wake up my senses. Something like Santa Maria al Monte, or Zucca. Those are both amari. They’re spicy and zesty, really herbaceous and have a lingering menthol finish. They pair really well with coffee. And usually after a huge meal, I want to drink some coffee because I’m about to fall asleep.”
With white meat:
“If I was having poultry or pork, I would have another amaro like Luxardo Amaro Abano which carries a pretty heavy alpine profile. There’s some nice mint and some citrus. It’s refreshing but still full-flavored and bold and it kind of just carries through the meal.”
With sweets:
“There’s a lot of vanilla and oaky qualities—rich, nutty qualities– that you can get from scotches and Calvados and cognacs that pair really well with dark chocolate or anything on the sweeter side. Especially around the holidays, typically, you have to eat dessert because what’s a holiday without having some pumpkin pie? You can put a couple rocks in something like a Calvados so it gets nice and cellar-temp and it’s easy to drink with dessert.”
With coffee:
“Ramazzotti carries a sarsaparilla, kind of nutty, rich, a little bit caramel-y quality to it. Which goes really well in espresso. I’ve put Amaro Nonino in my coffee which is really caramel-y and really citrus-y and really floral. Something like Santa Maria or Zucca tastes good side-by-side with coffee.”
If you’re an amaro novice, Missa recommends something easy-drinking with more floral, citrus qualities like Cardamaro, Averna, or Meletti before “you go into something big like a Fernet or Nardini Bassano.” For your best bet, head to the bar at The Blue Room and she and her team can ease you into bitters with their cocktail creations and recommendations. Find your favorite so you can forget the holiday Alka-Seltzer—that certainly deserves a toast.
The University of Massachusetts-Amherst has cut ties with alumnus Bill Cosby amid allegations by women accusing the comedian of sexual assault.
University spokesman Edward Blaguszewski told the Boston Globe on Wednesday that school officials had asked Cosby to step down as an honorary co-chairman of the university’s $300 million fundraising campaign, and Cosby agreed.
Cosby received a master’s and a doctorate in education from the university. He and his wife, Camille, donated several hundred thousand dollars to the school.
Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley sent a letter to the university urging them to cut ties with Cosby.
Coakley said that while Cosby hadn’t been criminally charged, his association sends the wrong message at a time when the state is focused on the prevention of campus sexual assault.
Cosby’s lawyer has called the allegations “unsubstantiated” and “discredited.”
Don't smoke in the train station. Don't spit your gum on the floor. And please, god, don't splay your legs out like no one else is around you. These sound like basic rules of today's public transit, but they're actually messages that graced the walls of Tokyo's subway forty years ago.
Stretching from one end of the Palais de Tokyo gallery in Paris to the other, these strange translucent tunnels look like human-sized versions of the funnel-shaped webs of grass spiders. Instead of helplessly trapped insects, you’ll find people crawling around inside, their weight supported by nothing more than layer after layer of sticky tape and plastic.
Tape Paris is the latest interactive art installation by Croatian-Austrian design collective Numen/For Use, described as a “stretched biomorphic skin” suspended halfway between the floor and ceiling of the gallery’s main hall. The designers see it as a “site specific, parasitical structure invading an arbitrary location.”
Visitors are invited to climb inside, navigating tunnels that vary in height to enable standing at some points but require crawling at others. Those inside can gaze down at the hazy shapes of onlookers below. The basis of the installation is criss-crossed Scotch tape which is reinforced on the outside with an elastic plastic sheeting.
In addition to other tape structures, Numen/For Use is known for inhabitable string and net installations including a gridded ‘social sculpture’ modeled after dadaist collages and suspended nets inside a massive inflatable bubble forming a sort of adult-sized bounce house.
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It looks like the work of some fictional spider from hell, but this art installation by design collective For Use/Numen is actually made from packing tape.
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Upon the centuries-old architecture of Place Vendome in Paris, nest-like structures of head-scratching proportions have appeared; messy wooden lean-to huts ...Click Here to Read More »»
People always joke about the many uses of duct tape, but few take its use as a material as seriously as these diehard duct tape designers.
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A March 1934 issue of the technology magazine Modern Mechanix details the plans by engineering scholar Norman Sper to fill in New York City’s Hudson River in order to increase the landmass of Manhattan and help alleviate the housing and traffic problems of a rapidly growing population.
If the Russians had the vision and the courage not only to build huge cities from the ground up, but to practically rebuild an empire, surely America should not be frightened at a project as big as this.
trigger warning: I can't read anything anymore basically
Wait—that's got to be an exaggeration. It's not like the reporter is actually quoting the charge sheet—
"On and/or about the 20th day of Sept. 20, 2009 at or near 222 S. Florissant within the corporate limits of Ferguson, Missouri, the above named defendant did then and there unlawfully commit the offense of 'property damage,' to wit, did transfer blood to the uniform," reads the charge sheet.
Okay then.
No Yelp reviews yet, but only getting 1.2 stars on Google+
As Michael Daly reports at The Daily Beast, the address where the defendant was said to have so wantonly damaged these officers' uniforms is in fact the address of the Ferguson Police Department, which recently took over from the colon-searchers in Deming, New Mexico, as America's favorite. Did the above-named defendant go down there voluntarily and throw blood upon their uniforms? No he did not.
The above-named defendant was 52-year-old Henry Davis, who was a Henry Davis but not the Henry Davis they were looking for. This Henry Davis had the bad luck to be caught in a driving rainstorm on the highway, reportedly missing the exit for St. Charles and ending up in Ferguson. Having pulled over to wait out the rain, he became the prey of an officer who ran his plate and found an outstanding warrant for "Henry Davis."
The two Henry Davises had different middle names and Social Security numbers, but these details, and the corresponding likelihood that the person in custody was an entirely different human being not suspected of anything, do not seem to have been important. Though the booking officer realized the problem, he did not let Davis go. When Davis objected to being locked up and forced to sleep on a cement floor, the officer summoned others. Words were exchanged, probably—you know how people smart off in Ferguson when being hassled for no reason—and Davis was beaten and kicked in the head.
In this emergency-room photo, you can see where Davis got the blood that he allegedly "transferred" to the uniforms of the officers who beat and kicked him. Possibly while they were beating and kicking him, but the report is not totally clear as to when said transfer occurred.
To be honest, there are reasons to believe that it never occurred at all. Such as the fact that the officers involved all admitted under oath that it didn't. That's one pretty good reason.
According to the report, which quotes from the depositions, one officer basically admitted under oath that he had lied under oath when he signed the criminal complaint against Davis. At that point it had presumably become more important to lie about beating Davis in the first place—he had sued by then—than to go after him for blood-related uniform damage. All the officers, in fact, claimed none of them struck Davis and that they did not see him bleeding. A little awkward, considering they had charged him with bleeding on them.
Somehow, a federal magistrate ruled that the perjury and Davis's injuries were too minor to sustain his due-process and excessive-force claims. Kind of astonishing. The case is on appeal, though, and Davis's lawyer suggested that recent events in Ferguson might lead that court to take the claim a little more seriously.
The Daily Beast also notes that the officer who has since been identified as the one who shot Michael Brown had been on the job for about two years at the time of the Davis incident. Did he learn from it? We don't know yet. Not for sure, anyway.
This isn't new information: one way to support Ferguson is to donate to the city's public library, which has provided all manner of community support, including maintaining normal hours and bringing in teachers and volunteers when the city's public schools closed. But since yesterday's grand jury decision, there's been a huge outpouring of public support for the library on Twitter.
It started with this tweet Buzzfeed's Ashley Ford:
I have to believe we are going to be better and do better by one another even if I cannot yet see how. If I don’t believe that, I, we, have nothing.
On Twitter last night, Ashley Ford shared that she donated to the Ferguson Public Library, which inspired me and many others to do the same. I hope you can donate, too. We have words and we can make sure the people of Ferguson have them too.
One of Ford's tweets was shared 266 times, and many famous (Neil Gaiman) and less-famous (Anne Helen Peterson) writers tweeted about donating to the library. By the end of the day, Ford reported that donations to Ferguson's public library had reached five figures.
ay to eat” includes amari, bitter herbal liqueurs served after a meal as digestivos. “You start with an aperitivo, you have wine throughout dinner, and you finish with a digestivo. Unlike aperitivos which are supposed to open up the palate and ease into the meal, digestivos are supposed to have a medicinal quality and to aid in digestion. Whether they truly do or not, I’m mentally convinced that they help or at least just calm my nerves after shocking my body with copious amounts of food.”
like Cardamaro, Averna, or Meletti before “you go into something big like a Fernet or Nardini Bassano.” For your best bet, head to the bar at The Blue Room and she and her team can ease you into bitters with their cocktail creations and recommendations. Find your favorite so you can forget the holiday Alka-Seltzer—that certainly deserves a toast.
