Things To Drink This Fall: Apple Brandy Cocktails

by Emerson Beyer

You could argue that the brown-liquor renaissance of recent years has been a reaction to the vodka-drenched Pucker-corrupted cocktail decade that preceded it, which experienced its nadir in the hideous appletini. But in the tail end of apple season, with plenty of good cider available, I wanted to renew the apple “martini” (I succumb to the troubling but widespread practice of categorizing mixed drinks by glass) and unlock its long-betrayed potential. While bourbon may spring to mind as the obvious way to achieve this, I realized that, in fact, brandy was the key here, and I had a chance to resist the bourbon hegemony that has crowded out brandy from many home bars (except, apparently in Wisconsin).

Brandy is a terrific cold weather drink, a way of holding on to the summer sun, captured in the fruits of the orchard, and distilling it for year-round enjoyment, ideally in front of a blazing fireplace. During the fall we have a special chance to combine the pleasures of fresh apple cider with apple brandy, a combination that has been tested in numerous cocktail recipes sharing the name “Normandy.”

The Normandy name for this drink honors the origin of Calvados, a very special apple brandy that is worth the expense because, unlike its liquor store-shelf neighbor Applejack, it is made entirely from distilled apple cider (the dry, fermented kind, known in America as “hard” cider), whereas Applejack blends distilled cider with up to 80% neutral spirits.

Calvados is expensive, and it’s also very light on the palate, which makes it perfect for sipping but too faint (and a bad value) when shaken into a cocktail. By adding “regular” French brandy, we can get that lovely Calvados note that boosts and concentrates the apple cider flavor (which can otherwise be insipid), and then adding both volume and botanical complexity with gin, we get a well-rounded and flavorful fall drink that conjures a little bit of France and a little bit of colonial America. Perhaps a fair tribute to Lafayette at Brandywine.

The recipe is easy, and one thing I like about it is that it’s scalable, so you can make a pitcher full before a party, then shake individual drinks with ice and strain them out one at a time. This is a “4 : 3 : 2 : 1” recipe.
• 4 parts fresh, unfiltered apple cider
• 3 parts French brandy (ensuring it is not blended with “neutral spirits”)
• 2 parts Calvados
• 1 part gin

A generous dash of bitters add an appreciable dimension to this drink, and I like using clove-scented orange bitters here in particular. (Total aside: homemade bitters would be a great holiday gift.)

As I was taste testing different versions of this drink, I thought about using some Calvados to fall-ify my favorite sweet summer cocktail, the Sidecar, an experiment which frankly didn’t work at all. But there’s a version of the Sidecar known as the Chapel Hill, made with bourbon. It seemed to me that marrying Calvados with bourbon in a Sidecar-like contraption might hit all the right autumnal notes, and sure enough it worked. I am dubbing it the “Apple Hill.”

This recipe has the simple ratio of “1 : 1 : ½ : ½” like this:
• 1 ounce Calvados
• 1 ounce bourbon
• ½ ounce Cointreau (or other fine orange liqueur)
• Juice of ½ lemon

As shake over ice and strain. To put a fine point on its seasonal spirit, I garnished with a thin slice of Fuyu persimmon.

If perhaps you are a bit put off by even the simplest tarte tatin recipe, particularly on a weeknight, I hope these two drinks will give you all the apply enjoyment you need in these crisp autumn days and nights.

Previously: Drinks For Hibernation: How To Make Bear Milk

K. Emerson Beyer, environmentalist and gadabout, lives in Durham, N.C. and tweets as @patebrisee.

America’s favorite British spy/murderer is back in the new blockbuster Skyfall, and once again we are all wondering what it is about playing James Bond that makes actors get very old almost immediately. Is it some kind of English curse? Just look at Daniel Craig. Yes, a very handsome man with very blue eyes and very pronounced biceps in a state of “perpetual plyometric engagement,” but the dude is only 44 years old! He’s six years younger than Tom Cruise, who still looks about 25. Anyway, this so-called English Curse That Makes Bond Actors Super Old is a real thing, which can be documented with photographs, so that is exactly what we have done for you.

Next, beloved Scottish icon Sean Connery, who began the James Bond series as a smooth-skinned youth … but ended it just a few years later as a bald, pot-bellied pig. In the same time it took Paul McCartney to basically go through puberty, Sean Connery aged a quarter of a century, boom. Later, People magazine named him the “most sexiest man to ever live,” because that was a thing for a while. And despite being basically the same age as Harrison Ford, Sean Connery played Harrison Ford’s dad in one of those Indiana Jones movies. Is the English Curse also a Scottish Curse? Probably.

The worst James Bond was this guy, Roger Moore. Reportedly a very nice/pleasant man (and a KNIGHT, because of the Queen or whatever), Sir Roger Moore went from 1970s heartthrob (we guess?) to doddering geriatric in what seemed like about six months. Don’t let this happen to the handsome men in your life.

Timothy Dalton was a very underappreciated James Bond. He was hard-ass, and The Living Daylights was the best 007 movie in, who knows, probably 10 years in either direction. But, because of the dreaded English Curse of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, tough-but-handsome Timothy Dalton rapidly deteriorated into something like The Gollum. He is still a good actor, though, and recently played a Space Monster on Doctor Who.

And then there’s “the forgotten Bond,” the suave Pierce Brosnan, now best known as teevee’s Brian Williams.

Ha ha, actually this is Old Pierce Brosnan, preparing for his Broadway role as Kentucky Fried Chicken mastermind Colonel Sanders in the upcoming musical Franchise, the Musical!

Finally, we have George Lazenby, “”a popular figure on Twitter” (?), and also a respected Australian fashion model who portrayed James Bond in the gritty and weird On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Then the producers brought Sean Connery back, in a toupée and girdle. Lazenby did get old, but not in a particularly fast way, and also maybe nobody was looking?

But the Bond curse does not always do terrible things to the series’ actors … especially if they’re actresses. One example is Maud Adams, she of Octopussy and The Man With the Golden Gun, who is now 67 years old and, as you see in the picture on the right, from just a few years ago, looks amaze. Perhaps this is because of the goddess/princess Diana, who watches over the Bond Ladies and would still be England’s queen of hearts at 50, if she hadn’t been killed by the Saudis or Prince Charles or whatever. Leave the killing to James Bond, the agent with a license to kill and also a license to get super old very quickly.

Related: Villainous Hair

Ken Layne portrayed Agent 007 in the classic 1954 American television version of Casino Royale.

“Gooch, what’s all the fuss about, homie? Your latest work Trap God is still in our rotation and you haven’t had buzz like this since The State vs. Radric Davis. And it ain’t because of no bickering beef. It’s cause the trap beats and charismatic flows are back on point like Rondo. But there you go ruffling everyone’s feathers. With all due respect, we need less diss antics and more ratchet musical masterpieces. You ain’t been locked up in a minute. So stay in it to win it and stack that unnecessary bullshit on the shelf. No one’s questioning your realness, the deal is, we just want more good music and less extracurricular fuckery. Get your money, Mane.”
 — Rap Radar’s Elliott Wilson writes a note to Gucci Mane advising him to stop fighting with other rappers. Gucci’s new song is really good, as is his whole new mixtape, Trap God. Here are a bunch of other songs about two things, starting (yeah, come on, Gucci!) with “Love & Happiness.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCXEtvbJkkY

Six years after it came out, Cadillac Don’s one national hit is still sounding like maybe the best beat made this century.

Who needs Prince to allow his original music to be posted on YouTube? (Just kidding. I need that very badly. But these surrogates are a joy to watch.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIPBo8ZEphQ

That’s a little less impressive.

That’s probably the best Pavement knock-off that Grandaddy never wrote, right?

Which is better, Black Sabbath’s “Heaven & Hell,” or Raekwon and Ghost’s? I don’t know!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FJ8x6wnZy8

Who would have thought that such a great song could have been made out of an old Emily Litela joke? (David Byrne, I guess, because he’s so smart.)

Give it up, anyone else who ever tried to sing ever.

Is Juicy J really the no. 1 ranked “get-high rapper”? I haven’t seen US News & World Report’s latest list, so I guess he might be!

Posting this song twice in one day is the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. (Which tells you a lot about my life.)

Villainous Hair

by Madeline Grimes

Even if you’ve only seen a trailer for Skyfall, the new and very good James Bond movie, you know Javier Bardem is the villain. Instantly. It’s his haircut: a meringue of floppy blond mullet, as if the hairstyles of Michael Bolton and Nicolas Cage had crept off, spent a night of torrid passion together, and this bleached muskrat was the result of their union. The style doesn’t suit Bardem’s face or the setting, and no self-respecting man would ever consider wearing his hair in such a fashion (nor would any Hollywood stylist allow it) — that is, unless he was evil. Pure, unadulterated, villainous evil.

It seems that possession of a terrible haircut is the Hollywood litmus test for evil. The hairstyles of movie villains are the physical embodiment of their criminal and immoral impulses. Whereas the heroes and heroines of Hollywood are blessed, in large part, with beautiful, flowing locks that indicate youth, virility and virtue, the villain is cursed with balding, wild, or dual-color dos that speak to his or her madness, isolation, and immorality. With few exceptions — most notably, Hitler’s toothbrush mustache and Mugabe’s philtrum thing, and, oh, Trump — the hair of the villains who exist outside of movies is, well, normal, at least in our modern times. Generally, in real life, evil approaches by stealth — it doesn’t announce its cruel intentions with a bad perm. But in film and TV, bad hair is what signals something wicked (and funny-looking) this way comes. And we can see this in the past 50 years of Bond films, which have shown us all the way different, hideous ways a villain might appear onscreen.

THE TYRANT WITH HIS DIPPITY-DOO GEL

The point of the villain’s haircut is to let us know at first sight, just what type of villain we’re dealing with. Take, for instance, the tyrant: A man or woman who seeks power and control over others at any price. In the Bond catalog, we saw such a character recently in Casino Royale’s Le Chiffre.

We know LeChiffre’s evil and not only because of the eye that weeps blood (although that is one indicator!). It’s also that hair: Greased and slick as a wet otter. It’s a style that attempts and fails to mask a diabolical nature. And we’ve seen it countless times.

In the 80s, this look was popular on men who prized power over everything else. Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko, ruthlessly careened around Wall Street, hungry for more money and more power. Then there was William Atherton’s Walter Peck whose inflated sense of self-worth as an EPA Agent in Ghostbusters warranted a slap from Slimer.

The common thread between these characters, besides their delusions of grandeur and propensity for malevolence, is their hair. Wet, slick backed, neatly combed ‘dos that requires a half-gallon of hair gel and a dedication to owning the nickname “Vaselino.”

It’s a haircut that says, “I am powerful, and I exert control over every follicle on my head… and I intend to extend that control over you too.” And this is where such tyranny tips over to…

… American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman.

And he’s not the only psychopath with a greasy coif. There’s Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) who has an expertly slicked back mane (and perfectly manicured beard) in Die Hard. Gruber is the type of psychopathic mastermind who will stop at nothing — not even a piling bodycount — to get what he wants. And he wants a lot of money, ostensibly so that he continue to get his hair done at Europe’s finest salons.

In Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter famously wears his hair slicked straight back on his head. But it’s when we meet Dr. Frederick Chilton, the director of the sanitarium where Lecter is jailed, that we know we are in the presence of something much worse than a cannibal — a vain & petty tyrant.

THE EERILY UNNATURAL DYE JOB

In Skyfall, Javier Bardem’s Raoul Silva wears what can only be described as a surfer’s hairdo gone terribly wrong. The bleached blond color suggests that along with the pigment of his hair, something of Silva’s humanity has also been stripped away. This isn’t the first Bond villain with hair too fair to be natural. Silva had a predecessor in Christopher Walken’s portrayal of Max Zorin in A View to a Kill. Zorin’s Ken Doll emulation makes him seem immediately suspicious.

Even child villains aren’t exempt from evil hair. In the Harry Potter series, Draco Malfoy has an unbecoming and too-blond-to-be-true ‘do.

And his pal, dear old Severus Snape (Alan Rickman), commandeers the potions class with sarcasm and cruelty. His hair color isn’t blonde, but it certainly isn’t natural. It’s too dark, too black, and too unreal to belong to anyone but a villain (or so we think!).

VERY BAD, NO-GOOD, POWER-HUNGRY LADIES

In women, tyrannical hair tends to manifest itself in the form of a “power hair.” This style indicate that a woman is willing to put in the time and money to create a look that immediately signifies her dominance and control. Power hair is usually short and meticulously styled. Although this style is occasionally seen on protagonists — and almost always on the heads of high-powered, domineering female politicians — villainesses are just as likely to wear it. Rosa Klebb from From Russia With Love wears her hair in a utilitarian no-nonsense style. Her hair is serious, and her intentions diabolical.

And then there’s Grace Jones as May Day in A View to a Kill. Jones sports a sharply glossed style that you know took hours to create. It’s a style of unequivocal strength and just a dash of immorality.

Likewise Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) in The Devil Wears Prada, doesn’t mind laboring over her hair. With the help of her expertly hair sprayed coif, she backstabs her employee and confidant, ladder climbs on the heads of colleagues, and conducts a reign of terror on poor, anorexia-coveting Anne Hathaway. Could she do that with the blonde flowing locks of, say, Buttercup in Princess Bride?

Or there’s Cate Blanchett’s Irina Spalko in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Her overly angled (and completely mis-colored) bob immediately signals “danger.” Run Indy, run!

Even Disney villainesses have power hair. But when enraged, they tend to morph into crazy, wild-haired- tresses-gone-crazy wrathful lunatics. Take Cruella de Vil’s dual-colored coif in 101 Dalmatians. By day and sunny disposition, it’s an elegant, bourgeois black-and-white style that she, no doubt, spends hours maintaining. But when things aren’t going well for Cruella and her rage gets the best of her, her hair transforms, monstrously into Medusa-like twists and coils; hair that cannot be stymied by mere spray, hair that has come unhinged. Just like Cruella.

The same happens to Ursula. Scheming, manipulative, Ariel-just-give-me-your-voice Ursula has well-kept (if not necessarily stylish) hair that seems to resemble Miranda Priestly’s hairspray-stabilized bob. But the moment Ursula gets power, her hair (and her temper) goes crazy.

THE DORKY LACKEY AND THE MANIACAL MUSTACHE

Sidekicks, no matter what team they play on, tend to be doofuses. They’re plucky, hapless dimwits who follow their master’s lead no matter the consequence. They’re never as cool, or suave, or maniacal, or smart as their leader. And their hair lets you know just where they land: Far short of cool.

Bond villains tend to have a series of henchmen do their bidding, and like their masters, these henchmen inevitably have, in varying degrees, bad hair. In the recent Quantum of Solace, Elvis (played by Anatole Taubman) has a monastic hairstyle that signals he probably went to his prom dateless.

And I’m guessing Mr. Kidd (Diamonds Are Forever) with his half-balding comb-over mullet was never voted homecoming king.

And who could forget Oddjob (Goldfinger)? In this case, it wasn’t his hair that spelled evil, but his mustache, which was as murderously precise as he was.

His was a look reminiscent of the villains depicted in early films: Cackling, mustache-twilling mad men prone to laying women across the tracks of oncoming trains. These villains were portrayed as pure evil: Caustic, belligerent foils that served to highlight the virtuous qualities of the hero. And their hair was bad, but it wasn’t horrible.

Their mustaches, on the other hand, were monstrous: Thin black lines that when twirled — and what pray tell, does that action signify if not a conjuring of evil plans? — curled into comical Shirley Temple corkscrews — this convention lived on in the character of Snidely Whiplash. Then there were the wispy black whiskers that jutted downwards, sideways, and up in angles that seem outlandish and gravitationally improbable. See the evil genius Fu Manchu.

SOMETIMES I FEEL SO CRAZY AND SO DOES MY HAIR

Crazy hair is another villain favorite for both men and women. In A View to Kill, Dr. Carl Mortner (aka Hans Glaub) fills the role of the mad scientist archetype. It is his lunacy that creates and fosters psychopathic super children like Max Zorin. His hair, like his mind, is in disorder. It’s white and thinning, and unkempt looking. And it isn’t just the hair on his head. It’s the bushy white caterpillars he claims for eyebrows. They’re unwieldy beasts, thoroughly untameable. As loony as the Doctor himself.

In Fatal Attraction, Alex Forrest (played by Glenn Close) wears a wild mop top of blond curls. Her hair gets progressively larger and out of order as time passes, until we know, with certainty, that she’s mad.

And David Bowie’s bleached spiky fright wig in Labrynth is an indicator that Jareth might not be all there. After all, he falls in love with a teenager he knows for all of three hours, his only friends are puppets, and he’s prone to singing songs about magic while wearing bright purple leggings. He is either fabulously awesome, or batshit crazy. There is no in between.

BALD, BALD, BALD, YOU’RE BALD AS AN EVIL PING-PONG BALL

Not all villains even have hair, some suffer from the “bald of evil.” Baldness, in this sense, is equated with moral ineptitude, as if to suggest that the character’s hair, and thus their humanity, was scourged away by their immorality. There’s Kratt, Le Chiffre’s twisted and cunning henchman in Casino Royale; and then there’s Bond’s most infamous (and recurring) nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. In his most memorable characterization, (You Only Live Twice), Blofeld is bald and scarred, maniacally stroking a fluffy white Turkish Angora cat as if jealous that her hair still exists. (You might recognize this villain not from the original, but from Mike Myers portrayal of Dr. Evil in Austin Powers)

Blofeld leads the charge in the archetype of Evil Genius. But he’s not alone.

There’s Superman’s rival, Lex Luthor, who loses his hair, tragically in a chemical fire. Luthor blames Superman (then but a young Superboy) for his hair loss. And he’s pissed about it.

Or on TV, there’s the Brain whose maniacal plans to take over the world are foiled again and again. (Even Pinky, has a few goofy tufts of white mouse hair that show he hasn’t been corrupted by his devious master.)

And then there are the villains who aren’t necessarily geniuses; they’re just plain evil.

Bane in The Dark Knight Rises represents the avenging psychopath.

And Mr. Potter plays the heartless banker out to get the little guy in It’s a Wonderful Life.

The moral is, if they don’t have hair, don’t trust them.

HANDSOME MAN GIVEN BAD HAIRSTYLES REPEATEDLY

Skyfall wasn’t the first time, of course, Bardem has appeared on screen as a villain with bad hair. In No Country for Old Men, Bardem’s Anton sports a childlike pageboy cut. The look was based on the styles worn by British soldiers during the Medieval Crusades, and it was designed to look “strange and unsettling.”

It was.

His hair hung heavily around his face, and even at his most merciless, shooting people like an eight-year old playing “Duck Hunt,” not a strand strayed from his carefully side-parted coif. Anton had obviously never opened a copy of GQ or Esquire. He was too busy flipping coins for lives and bargaining with little boys for t-shirts to bother with style. And his haircut exemplifies just this. We know, merely by glancing at him, that he’s lost touch with reality. Anton is no longer a functioning member of society; he is devoid of emotion, care, and empathy. His hair tells us so.

Bardem’s Anton will always be my favorite villain’s haircut. It’s something in the creepy way his ears are always hidden by a sheath of brown hair. The way his hair never moves, as if no mother or father ever dared to ruffle it or love it. It’s the type of haircut where if you saw it on someone in the supermarket or at a coffee shop, you would know to never make eye contact, and to back carefully and slowly away from its possessor. I’m guessing Bardem’s newest villain in Skyfall is just as terrifying. Because let’s face it, that hair is clearly up to no good.

Related: Being James Bond Also Makes You Get Really Old, Very Quickly!

Madeline Grimes is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her website can be found here.

It’s been a rough month. In one small bright spot, there is the fact that, right now, in November, after the hurricane, after the first snow, you can eat a better-tasting tomato than you have eaten all year. (Thanks, global warming.) Over in Park Slope, Scalino on 7th Avenue and 10 Street is still serving up a “Jersey Tomato Salad,” but not for long. Go today or within the next week, because the guy who runs the place told me that’s as long as he’ll have this particularly fantastic batch of tomatoes he gets from a farmer he knows who probably likes Bruce Springsteen.

Or, the Smithereens. (Lord knows, we’ve all been seeing enough of Bruce lately, right? Not that those pictures of him and Obama and Jay-Z didn’t make me smile, but still.) The Smithereens are criminally underrated. Their album Especially For You, from 1986, is just chock full of hits, nothing but, front-to-back. Pat DiNizio is as Jersey as Jersey guys get. Bad hair and slouchy posture and all.

The tomatoes are big and round and red and sliced into plump wedges and dressed with arugula leaves and olive oil and dice-sized cubes of a dry, salty blue cheese. Also order some other things. I highly recommend the shrimp with arugula and cannellini beans and cherry tomatos — but that’s basically a salad, too. So if you’re going by yourself, you might want to get something else, to avoid redundancy. (Oh, and going to this restaurant by oneself is a very pleasant experience. It’s that kind of place:pretty, casual, big windows that let in a lot of light, and the people there are really nice. It’s not usually too crowded, at least at lunch time, so you can sit for a while and read a book — have you read Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds? It’s dynamite — and drink a glass of wine. Or, if you try the Cuvee de Pena, two glasses.)

I had an excellent cauliflower puree soup the other day; it tasted just like cauliflower and the chopped basil and bay leaves that were in it, and the flakes of black pepper the waiter ground into it, and olive oil. There’s no cream in the cauliflower puree, thankfully. While I am the type of glutton who might pour a little extra olive oil into soup, I am not the type of glutton who likes to feel that he’s just drank a big bowl of cream lightly flavored by a vegetable. Also, if they have it, definitely get the sauteed mushrooms. I had sauteed mushrooms there a while ago that blew my mind. Oyster mushrooms, served with seared sliced garlic and big springs of thyme and very little else. Everyone says mushrooms taste “earthy” and “like the forest,” but it’s true, that’s how good mushrooms taste. So yeah, the oyster mushrooms tasted like a clean, earthy forest. Not like oysters. The calamari is served pretty much the same way. Also delicious. But less like the forest, and I suppose, more like oysters. But only a bit. You know what calamari tastes like.

Since I’ve been going to this place for lunch lately, I’ve been sticking with the lighter side of the menu (and then pouring extra olive oil on top of everything and all over myself and eating sticks of butter right out of the wrapper). I have not had a single less-than-great thing in my visits. There is no salt on the tables, which is always kind of a snobby statement like, “You can not be trusted with salt. Our chef will season your dish to perfection, you would only screw it up given the chance.” I applaud the confidence.

This past summer, as the guy who runs Scalino — a really nice guy from Pittsburgh who looks a bit like Chief from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and calls you “brother” and says thing like, “Yeah, it’s good for ya’,” when he refills your water glass — as he will tell you, it was one of the best summers for tomatoes we’ve ever had. And he’s been amazed by the longevity of the crop, too. (He is a guy who likes to talk about his food with you if you express interest.) It really feels like some kind of miracle to get to be eating them in November, after the storms, and after what happened to New Jersey. It’s like drinking orange juice on a vacation to Florida over Christmas break. Or maybe just like travelling back in time to September, when we were still all complaining about the heat and the draught that killed all our corn but for some reason left us with these big, ripe, red gifts from God New Jersey. But without the sweat, or the mosquitos. Remember when all we had to complain about was mosquitoes?

“Seeing lower Manhattan without power was a surreal experience. This is traditionally a city that never sleeps. One in which the lights are always on. One that is always bustling with people. When the lights went out it was wholly different. This piece is meant to capture and relay the feeling of what it was like to walk around the darkened streets of lower Manhattan.” [Via]

“Decisions based on instinct can have surprisingly positive outcomes, according to new research…. When asked to choose between two options based on instinct alone, volunteers made the right call up to 90 percent of the time, the researchers report.” Although other times, they get it pretty badly wrong.

Barack Obama smashed Mitt Romney like a plaster lawn gnome, but instead of taking a victory lap in a fighter jet, our re-elected and wildly popular president is crying all the time. Conservatives who care very much about the future of our country are asking, very seriously, “Why is Barack Obama such a wuss?”

Just look at your president, getting all teary-eyed for the second time in as many days. Maybe he will become a liberal in his second term, after all!

The Associated Press is all over this scandal:

It seems out of place: The president of the United States breaking down in tears as he thanked campaign workers for their tireless work for his re-election.

How can America tolerate this for another day? Should Obama resign now, before he shames this once-great nation again? No, it’s fine, because a Republican boozebag and a Russian semi-dictator both cry on camera. It’s okay to cry, after all:

The AP story spotlights other crying politicians, from Russian President Vladimir Putin — to Obama’s political opposite, Republican Speaker John Boehner.

As long as total jerks are doing it, we guess it’s okay for Barack Obama to get a little weepy now and then … as long as he immediately does something manly, like authorize another drone attack on poor brown kids somewhere.

“@morelikethemoon: G TRAIN IS BACK! @joelhota for President!”. HEY CALM DOWN

— Joe Lhota (@JoeLhota) November 7, 2012

On Thursday morning, inside his office, Mr. Lhota checked his BlackBerry often, hoping for an update on the L train. Moments later, he placed a call to Howard B. Glaser, Mr. Cuomo’s director of state operations, whom he wanted to brief on the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.

The tunnel could open Friday, he told Mr. Glaser, remarking that Mr. Bloomberg, “like an idiot,” had predicted publicly that the tunnel might open over the weekend. “He’s making it up,” he said, after a brief hail of profanity in which Mr. Lhota wondered aloud who, exactly, Mr. Bloomberg had been talking to.

“It’s wrong,” he told Mr. Glaser. “It’s just wrong.”

Mr. Lhota also spoke of the L line’s importance, as if his audience needed convincing.

“You know who knows where the L train goes?” he barked into the phone. “All the hipsters in Williamsburg.”

Sure, that is pretty much the greatest thing ever. That a Giuliani-era figure could arrive as a hero of New York City in 2012 is also pretty remarkable. Now, we know most of you Libertarians hate us big city folks. But surely you can get over it for a nice narrative. Because meanwhile, just outside New York City…

The Long Island Power Authority “neglected basic maintenance to prevent outages, such as replacing rotting poles and trimming trees around power lines, according to a state report released by the Public Service Commission’s Public Service Department in June. The $3.7 billion-a-year government-owned corporation spent $37.5 million less than committed over five years on hardening the grid to protect against major storm damage.” And so thousands and thousands of people are sitting around in the cold and dark.

Anyone who’s been a LIPA customer knows that they’re always about ten years behind the times, which is a laughing matter until you’re going on two weeks without power. Compared to other agencies like the MTA and Connecticut Light & Power, they look wildly incompetent.

You know those mornings when winter finally waves its chilly fist in your face and you fumble for the alarm clock, knocking it off the night stand, and decide you’re going to stay under the comfortable embrace of your covers for just a few minutes more and, as you lay there, drifting in between sleep and semi-consciousness, you start to think of all the terrible decisions and sins of omission that have brought you to the sorry point your life is in now and, liberated by the gauzy, borderless unreality that one discovers while barely awake in warm bedclothes, you start chipping away at the years, deleting every bad turn you’ve taken to get the place you’re at, until you realize that you can keep subtracting forever, but the root of the problem is basically your very existence, and now you’re imagining a world in which you were never born, in which, say, your sister came before you and you not at all; you’re not looking at this in a Jimmy Stewart, Wonderful Life kind of way; no, you’re considering how much better the planet is if you had never been a part of it — no one misses you because no one ever knew that you were there in the first place, there is no one you’ve hurt or disappointed, no one you’ve let down or been cruel to… in fact, your absence makes their lives, if not astoundingly superior, a bit more easy and less painful without you having been a part of them. And it’s that very knowledge that is the most comforting fact of all: “If I had never existed, everything would be better.” And as you drift back into that deep and pleasant sleep, luxuriating in the idea of a world which you have never troubled, the fucking alarm goes off again and you’re out of bed shivering to turn it off, resigned to the fact that you’re stuck here no matter what and whatever your intentions are you going to fuck things up for everyone again and again until you’re finally in the ground for good? You know those mornings? Well, don’t get too used to them yet. It’s gonna be close to 70 degrees on Monday, which is crazy. We’ll be sweating through our goddamn sheets. What a world.