bkremser

WHEN you hoist a leg over a barstool these days, you’re as likely to find Tom Edison as a Tom Collins. Light bulbs have been popping up behind the bar, with more cocktails developed in the last 10 years than probably any decade since Prohibition. Some of them have emerged as modern classics, standing out not only as culinary creations, but also as signposts of the decade’s most significant mixology trends. More

THE best dishes of the year? We’ll get to the roasted unicorn in dwarf-fairy reduction sauce soon enough. But perspective is everything. For much of 2009 I was not the restaurant critic of The New York Times. I was the newspaper’s culture editor, with little access to the sort of food that ordinarily appears in articles like this one. More

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — More than many countries, Vietnam has been buffeted by the ups and downs of globalization. More

MY CHILDHOOD Christmas memories include a three-foot-diameter silver-plastic wreath with a red Styrofoam reindeer leaping through its center that my father won as a door prize at some neighborhood bar. The thing was beyond garish, way past hideous. It redefined tacky, and Pop knew it. So each December, we faithfully hung it above the couch, right below the likewise traditional/likewise low-taste aluminum-foil “Happy Holidays’’ sign. Sometimes we hung beer cans on our Christmas tree. More

Passengers were rescued by a steam locomotive after modern rail services were brought to a halt by the snowy conditions in south-east England. More

>> President Obama, for not enacting my agenda fast enough.

>> Olympia Snowe, for hanging up when history called.

>> John McCain and Sarah Palin, for being the whiniest losing presidential ticket ever.

>> The traditional media, for another year of quoting politicians, "experts" and spokespeople without asking the fundamental question: "Are they speaking the truth, or am I being played for a sucker?" Too many times the answer is: Like a Tootsie Pop.

>> Whoever felt it was necessary to take from us this year: Walter Cronkite, Ted Kennedy, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Bea Arthur, Michael Jackson, Corazon Aquino, Henry Gibson, Mary Travers, Farrah Fawcett, John Hughes, Andrew Wyeth, and our 21 year-old cat.

>> Teabaggers, for achieving with ignorance and venom in the public square what a two-year-old achieves with creamed corn in his diaper.

>> Family values titans Tiger Woods, John Ensign and Mark Sanford, for thinking with the wrong head.

>> Credit card companies that skirt new federal regulations and charge 80 percent interest.

>> Joe Lieberman, walking proof that backstabbers and liars do, indeed, prosper. Remember that, kids!

>> Dick Cheney, for not going fishing more often.

>> Wall Street barons, for returning to their greedy, greedy ways and not even having the decency to pick the confetti out of their hair and the caviar out of their teeth before they tell us how grateful they are to us for bailing them out.

>> Compromises that seem to only extract concessions from the left.

>> The 53 percent of Maine voters who repealed our gay marriage law and proved that we are, in fact, not a "live and let live" state.

>> All the two-faced "concernvative" citizens and pundits who are nitpicking things Obama is doing that Bush also did but they never nitpicked him for those things, did they? Noooooooooo, they most certainly did not.

>> God, for not coming down here and straightening out this mess of a planet. She's dating another universe, isn’t she? Link

Today’s idea: Handwriting is dying because it’s a slow and inefficient way of getting our thoughts out — a hindrance to thinking, given the alternatives, an essay says. Answer

IT’S been a sad year for restaurant lovers in New York. All those birthdays, anniversaries and promotions commemorated at the now-shuttered Chanterelle, Fiamma, Lever House and La Goulue, to name only a few, consigned to bittersweet memory. More

AMONG the sleek new group of domestic distillers, Cheryl Lins is an original. Wearing a baseball cap, flannel-lined jeans and wire spectacles, she flits from store to cocktail bar, towing her cardboard box of goods, selling to old customers and looking for new. When making her sales pitch, she sometimes forgets to say that she’s the one who distills it, designs the label, waxes the cork and brings the bottles to market. And by the way: her varieties of absinthe are local. Even More Green Fairy

WARNING: You may assume that what you are about to read is the usual dutiful holiday roundup of Champagnes and sparkling wines. But you would be wrong. Ignore this at your own peril. Bubbly

CHICKEN liver is what the restaurateur Danny Meyer calls a torpedo. More